Two-user opportunistic scheduling using hierarchical modulations in wireless networks with heterogenous average link gains

Our contribution, in this paper, is two-fold. First, we analyze the performance of a hierarchical modulation-assisted two-best user opportunistic scheduling (TBS) scheme, which was proposed by the authors, in a fading environment where different users have different average link gains. Specifically, we present a new expression for the spectral efficiency (SE) of the users and using this expression, we compare the degrees of fairness (DOF) of the TBS scheme with that of classical single user opportunistic scheduling schemes, namely, absolute carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) based single-best user scheduling (SBS) and normalized CNR based proportional fair scheduling (PFS) schemes. The second contribution is that we propose a new hybrid two-user opportunistic scheduling (HTS) scheme based on our earlier proposed TBS scheme. This HTS scheme selects the first user based on the largest absolute CNR value among all the users while the second user is selected based on the ratios of the absolute CNRs to the corresponding average CNRs of the remaining users. The total transmission rate i.e., the constellation size is selected according to the absolute CNR of the first best user. The total transmission rate is then allocated among these selected users by joint consideration of their absolute CNRs and allocated number of information bit(s) are transmitted to them using hierarchical modulations. Numerical results are presented for a fading environment where different users experience independent but non-identical (i.n.d.) channel fading. These selected numerical results show that the proposed HTS scheme can considerably increase the system's fairness without any degradation of the link spectral efficiency (LSE) i.e., the multiuser diversity gain compared to the classical SBS scheme. These results also show that the proposed HTS scheme has a lower fairness in comparison to the PFS scheme which suffers from a considerable degradation in LSE. © 2010 IEEE.