Resource Allocation for the Uplink of a Multi-User Massive MIMO System

We study the uplink resource management of a multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output single cell for Zero-Forcing receive combining transmission. We consider jointly power allocation, user selection and modulation and coding scheme selection over multiple subchannels. Our contributions are twofold: we first propose a quasi-optimal offline algorithm that provides a target performance and then design and validate an efficient online proportional fair algorithm that performs the above steps. Due to user power constraints, the offline optimization is conducted jointly for all subchannels within a time slot, a computationally intensive task, prompting the proposal of a greedy offline algorithm that we validate in two ways: 1) for a small number of users, by solving the general problem to quasi-optimality and 2) for a larger number of users, by solving again to quasi-optimality a transformed version of the general problem when the channels are assumed flat. From the offline study, we find that, given the right user selection, equal power allocation can be employed without much degradation in performance. We also see that the number of channels allocated to users varies widely depending upon their channel gains. Using these insights, we propose our efficient real-time online algorithm that has runtime competitiveness with a state-of-the-art benchmark.