Scaling Laws of Scheduling Gain for Uplink Massive MIMO Systems: Is User Scheduling Still Beneficial for Massive MIMO?

In this paper, the scaling laws of scheduling gain and the feasibility of user scheduling for uplink massive multiple input–multiple output (MIMO) systems are investigated by analyzing the second moment of mutual information. We consider two well-known linear receivers of matched filter (MF) and zero-forcing (ZF). The exact distribution of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and its moment-generating function are first obtained, and the approximated variance of the mutual information for a user is derived as a closed form with a function of the number of antennas. The achievable scheduling gain under the optimal user scheduler is then derived using the Gaussianity of the sum rate. From the analyses and simulation results, it is found that the scheduling gain for the MF receiver increases with the number of base station (BS) antennas, while that for the ZF receiver decreases as the number of BS antennas increases, for most cases (except some impractical scenarios). Therefore, it is verified that user scheduling is still beneficial for the MF receiver while random user selection is sufficient for the ZF receiver in massive MIMO systems.