Determinant-Based MIMO Scheduling With Reduced Pilot Overhead

In a MultiUser Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) cellular system where there are many candidate users, it is critical to select a user group which maximizes the overall throughput of the system. However, the optimal scheduling strategy (exhaustive user selection) is computationally prohibitive when the total number of users is large. In this paper, the authors propose a determinant-based user selection algorithm which reduces the search complexity without much performance degradation. A key contribution of this paper is to use a matrix determinant as a measure of orthogonality as well as channel quality in user selection.