A tunable multiuser grouping and chunk allocation algorithm for controlling fairness-capacity tradeoff in SC FDMA/SDMA transmission

In this paper, we propose a fairness-controlled multiuser scheduling and resource allocation (RA) algorithm for uplink spatial division multiple access (SDMA)/ single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA). In fact, with the aim of improving the spectral efficiency (SE) and at the same time controlling the network fairness, a sub-optimal power projection method based on users' spatial correlation is employed, which chooses the users for each resource block (RB). We assume a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) scheme with correlation at receive antenna. By changing the maximum allowed number of simultaneously accessing users, we can choose the desired balance between SE and the fairness. Numerical analysis verifies that the proposed scheme improves the SE considerably at the target defined fairness level. We also investigate the variations in fairness for different system design parameters, i.e., RB size, number of receive antenna, etc.