Opportunistic Packet Scheduling in Cellular Networks with Base Station Antenna Arrays

: We study the issue of designing a downlink scheduling policy for a cellular network with base station antenna arrays. We derive an optimal scheduling policy that achieves the throughput region which is a set of feasible arrival rate vectors that can be stabilized by some scheduling policy. Then based on the structure of the derived optimal policy whose complexity increases exponentially with the number of users in the system, we propose two heuristic scheduling algorithms with much lower complexity. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithms perform much better than other heuristic algorithms that do not take into consideration the physical layer constraints and/or queue lengths in the sense that they have a larger throughput region than other heuristic algorithms.