One of the key technologies for the fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication system is massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) that applies beamforming in order to effectively compensate for large propagation losses in high frequency bands and enable the spatial multiplexing of a large number of signal streams over multiple users. To further improve a system throughput, a coordinated cluster system in which a large number of massive MIMO base stations are deployed in high density has been investigated. The dense deployment greatly improves the system capacity by controlling base stations from a centralized base band unit. However, when clusters are closely located in order to serve densely populated areas, inter-beam interference between adjacent clusters becomes more severe. To suppress the interference to adjacent clusters, only a simple beam switch control scheme at a cluster boundary has been investigated as a conventional scheme. In this paper, the scheduling algorithm for massive MIMO downlink transmission near cluster boundaries, which combines two scheduling algorithms, has been proposed. In the proposed scheme, each base station divides its own cell to multiple areas, switches supporting areas sequentially, and serves users in those areas. The numerical results show that the throughputs improve with a little reduction in a fairness index (FI) when the number of users per resource block is one. The FI reaches the highest when the number of users per cell is equal to the number of divided areas. The proposed scheme reduces computational complexity as compared with those of conventional two schemes.

In this paper, user scheduling with beam selection for full-digital massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) is proposed. Inter-user interference (IUI) can be canceled by precoding such as zero-forcing at a massive MIMO base station if ideal hardware implementation is assumed. However, owing to the non-ideal characteristics of hardware components, IUI occurs among multiple user terminals allocated on the same resource. Thus, in the proposed scheme, the directions of beams for allocated user terminals are adjusted to maximize the total user throughput. User allocation based on the user throughput after the adjustment of beam directivity is then carried out. Numerical results obtained through computer simulation show that when the number of user terminals in the cell is two and the number of user terminals allocated to one resource block (RB) is two, the throughput per subcarrier per subframe improves by about 3.0 bits. On the other hand, the fairness index (FI) is reduced by 0.03. This is because only the probability in the high throughput region increases as shown in the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of throughput per user. Also, as the number of user terminals in the cell increases, the amount of improvement in throughput decreases. As the number of allocated user terminals increases, more user terminals are allocated to the cell-edge, which reduces the average throughput.