Combined opportunistic beamforming and receive antenna selection [cellular downlink applications

Abstract — Opportunistic beamforming with proportional fair scheduling is a very promising technique that exploits multiuser diversity to achieve high data rates on the downlink while ensur-ing a certain level of fairness. However, it greatly improves system performance only for sufficiently large mobile user population. This paper proposes a technique enhancing opportunistic beam-forming at the transmitter with antenna selection at each mobile receiver to overcome this limitation. Significant performance im-provement is achieved especially for small number of users. The simplicity and inexpensive deployment of this technique make it a highly desirable enhancement to opportunistic beamforming. I