User scheduling with beam selection for full digital massive mimo base station

In this paper, user scheduling with beam selection for fulldigital massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) is proposed. Inter-user interference (IUI) can be canceled by precoding such as zero-forcing at a massive MIMO base station if ideal hardware implementation is assumed. However, owing to the non-ideal characteristics of hardware components, IUI occurs among multiple user terminals allocated on the same resource. Thus, in the proposed scheme, the directions of beams for allocated user terminals are adjusted to maximize the total user throughput. User allocation based on the user throughput after the adjustment of beam directivity is then carried out. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that when the number of user terminals in the cell is two and the number of user terminals allocated to one resource block (RB) is two, the throughput per subcarrier per subframe improves by about 3.0 bits. On the other hand, the fairness index (FI) is reduced by 0.03. This is because only the probability in the high throughput region increases as shown in the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of throughput per user. Also, as the number of user terminals in the cell increases, the amount of improvement in throughput decreases. As the number of allocated user terminals increases, more user terminals are allocated to the cell-edge, which reduces the average throughput.