Patent ID: 7852802

Claim:
A joint scheduling and grouping method for throughput maximization for an uplink space-division multiple access (SDMA) system operating under proportional fairness constraints, the uplink SDMA system including a receiver that employs parallel group decoding, has multiple receive antennas, and can communicate with each of a plurality of users via a downlink channel of limited capacity, the method comprising: specifying a decoding complexity constraint including a maximum group size; specifying a transmit power for each of the plurality of users; determining an uplink channel realization for each of the plurality of users; determining an optimal assignment of user rates and a partition including one or more groups of users that have been assigned positive rates, wherein the partition satisfies the decoding complexity constraint, and wherein the partition and the corresponding assigned user rates satisfy a non-outage condition in which all groups of the partition are decodable given the specified transmit powers and uplink channel realizations; communicating the user rates to the plurality of users using the downlink channel; and group decoding, in accordance with the partition, uplink communications received from the plurality of users, wherein the partition includes a plurality of groups which satisfy the decoding complexity constraint, no two of the groups can be combined without violating the decoding complexity constraint, and the method comprises: assigning rates to the users in each group in the partition such that each group is decodable when treating the remaining users in the partition as interferers; wherein a group is decodable if an associated metric satisfies a predetermined condition, the metric being responsive to the rates assigned to the users in the group, the uplink channel realizations for the users in the group and for the remaining users in the partition treated as interferers, and the transmit powers for the users in the group and for the remaining users in the partition treated as interferers.