Abstract: A novel user pairing algorithm for virtual MIMO systems was proposed based on semiorthogonal user selection (SUS) with partial inverse selection. To solve the problem that users with bad channel condition suffer from low throughput in the traditional SUS algorithm, this paper proposed a mechanism called ‘inverse selection’, which is derived from the analysis of the MMSE receiver. The simulation results show that the new algorithm largely improves the throughput of users with poor SINR at a reasonable cost of the overall throughput decrease, thus achieving a profitable tradeoff between system throughput and user fairness.

Key words: communication, virtual multipleinput multipleoutput (virtual MIMO), user pairing, semiorthogonal user selection (SUS), inverse selection