On Throughput-Fairness Tradeoff in Virtual MIMO Systems with Limited Feedback

The authors investigate the performance of channel-aware scheduling algorithms designed for the downlink of a wireless communication system. Their study focuses on a two-transmit antenna cellular system, where the base station can only rely on quantized versions of channel state information to carry out scheduling decisions. The motivation is to study the interaction between throughput and fairness of practical spatial multiplexing schemes when implemented using existing physical layer signaling, such as the one that exists in current wide-band code division multiple access downlink. Virtual MIMO system selects at each time instant a pair of users that report orthogonal (quantized) channels.