Coordinative switch beamforming scheduler for guaranteed service with service area subsectorization in next generation cellular network

Abstract

User equipments (UEs) served by narrow beams can acquire higher data rates with less interference to others. Coordinated/switched beamforming employs scheduled beam patterns per resource blocks among base stations to serve UEs' demand while avoiding interference across sectors. However, without careful scheduling, base stations may maltreat some served UEs which are not aimed at by their beam shapes, and these UEs require more resource blocks (RB) to meet traffic demands instead. This paper proposes a coordinative scheduler to estimate capacity of beam patterns and assign them to meet demand of guaranteed traffic. The scheduler effectively packs more guaranteed traffic to less RBs, and remaining RBs may accommodate more non-guaranteed traffic. Instead of allocating RBs to individual UEs, our scheduler allocates resource block groups (RBGs) to UE groups which consist of UEs in the same subsector, hence reducing coordinating messages among base stations.