User Grouping in Multiuser Satellite MIMO Downlink With Fairness Consideration

In this letter, a multi-user satellite MIMO downlink including a multi-beam GEO satellite and multiple user terminals (UTs) is considered. In order to make every UT get the service fairly, all UTs need to be divided into multiple groups so that UTs in the same group can be served simultaneously, and different groups can be served sequentially in different time slots. The user grouping problem is investigated in this letter with the objective of maximizing the average channel capacity per time slot, and a genetic based user grouping (GBUG) algorithm is proposed. Simulations show that the average channel capacity obtained by GBUG is larger than that of the existing algorithms in the ZF and MMSE precoding system.