Opportunistic beamforming with single beamforming matrix for virtual antenna arrays

Opportunistic beamforming is a promising technique for downlink channels in cellular systems. When opportunistic beamforming is to support multiple users at a time, it is important to form multiple beams with as little interference as possible. In the conventional approach with limited feedback of channel state information from users, the best beamforming matrix can be selected from a set of multiple beamforming matrices. Thus, at each time when a different set of users are selected by a scheduler, a new beamforming matrix has to be found, which may require excessive complexity. To avoid this problem, in this paper, we propose an opportunistic beamforming approach with a single fixed beamforming matrix for stationary users. Since the beams are fixed, we only need to perform user selection (and power allocation if necessary). It is also shown that the proposed approach is suited for a distributed virtual antenna array built by multiple base station or access point units, since the intercorrelation between the users' channel vectors in this case allows effective opportunistic beamforming based on user classification in conjunction with a single beamforming matrix.