Patent ID: 8208439

Claim:
A method, comprising: operating a receiver connected with a plurality of receive antennas to receive uplink signals from a plurality of users each having a plurality of transmit antennas; and scheduling which ones of the plurality of users are to transmit in a same time-frequency-code slot, where a particular user pairing configuration is denoted by π within a set of all configurations Π, and where scheduling comprises expressing mutual information as an additive objective function and maximizing the additive objective function over a particular choice of πεΠ, wherein the additive objective function that is maximized comprises: max π ∈ Π ⁢ ∑ ( k 1 , k 2 ) ∈ π ( N ) ⁢ ⁢ f k 1 , k 2 ⁡ ( π ) , where f is measure of performance for a pairing of users k 1 and k 2 and N is an integer total number of distinct pairs of users.