SLNR-based User Scheduling in Multi-cell networks: from Multi-antenna to Large-Scale Antenna System

In this paper, we investigate the performance of Signal to Leakage and Noise Radio (SLNR) based user scheduling in uplink of multi-cell with large-scale antenna system. Large antenna array is desired to improve the performance in future system by providing better beamforming capability. However, some studies have found that the signal channel is 'hardened' (becomes invariant) when the antenna number goes extremely large, which implies that the signal channel aware user scheduling may have no gain at all. With the mathematic tool of order statistics, we analyzed the signal and interference terms of SLNR in a homogeneous multicell network. The derived distribution function of signal and interference shows that the leakage channel's variance is much more influential than the signal channel's variance in large-scale antenna regime. So even though the signal channel is hardened, the SLNR-based scheduling can achieve remarkable multiuser diversity (MUD) gain due to the fluctuation of the uplink leakage channel. By providing the final SINR distribution, we verify that the SLNR-based scheduling can leverage MUD in a better way than the signal channel based scheduling. The Monte Carlo simulations show that the throughput gain of SLNR-based scheduling over signal channel based scheduling is significant.