Optimal one-shot scheduling for MIMO networks

A MIMO network is a wireless network made up of individual MIMO links. The problem we consider is to maximize throughput in a multihop MIMO network with interference suppression. Our problem formulation accounts for variable rates on the MIMO links, which depend on the channel conditions of the link, and the manner in which the diversity-multiplexing trade-off is handled. We present an ILP formulation of the MIMO one-shot scheduling problem with variable rates, which is the first exact formulation of a MIMO network optimization problem that accounts for full interference suppression capabilities of MIMO links. We use CPLEX to evaluate the optimal solution based on the ILP formulation for wireless networks with up to 32 concurrently transmitting links. We also modify a heuristic algorithm from a related MIMO scheduling problem to work in our problem setting. Results show that the heuristic can scale to networks with 80 or more concurrent links, but is 10–20% from optimal in terms of throughput. We show that the heuristic scheduler is not able to fully exploit the diversity-multiplexing-interference suppression tradeoff, which is inherent in the problem. This shows that there is substantial room for developing improved scheduling algorithms for MIMO networks and provides some insight into promising directions to explore.