A low-complexity beamforming-based scheduling to downlink OFDMA/SDMA systems with multimedia traffic

In this paper, we propose a low-complexity beamforming-based scheduling scheme utilizing a semi-orthogonal user selection (SUS) algorithm in downlink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA)/space division multiple access (SDMA) systems to support multimedia traffic. One of the challenges in the multi-dimensional (space, time, and frequency) radio resource allocation problem for OFDMA/SDMA systems is its high complexity, especially to simultaneously satisfy the quality of services (QoS) requirements for various traffic classes. In the literature, the SUS algorithm is usually applied to the single-class traffic environment, but extending the SUS algorithm to the multimedia environment is not straightforward because of the need to prioritize the real-time (RT) users and the non-real-time (NRT) users. To solve this problem, we propose the concept of urgency value to guarantee the fairness of the NRT as well as the best effort (BE) users while satisfying the delay requirement for the RT users. Simulation results show that, when traffic load is greater than 0.5, the proposed scheduling algorithm can improve the fairness performance by more than 100% over the most recently proposed algorithms.