Hakki Soy, Necmettin Erbakan University, Turkey

This study investigates the performances of several scheduling algorithms (Round Robin, maximum SNR and opportunistic Round Robin) in the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of wireless network with cellular architecture. The spectral efficiency and fairness are two important metrics to evaluate the performance of wireless systems. The Nakagami-m distribution is a generalized way to model the small scale fading and it can characterize the various wireless fading channel conditions by changing the value of m parameter. The channel is assumed to have a Nakagami-m slow fading model and the opportunistic beamforming scheme is used to enlarge the rate / dynamic range of channel fluctuations through the employment of multiple antennas at the base station. The MATLAB based Monte Carlo simulations are implemented to show the effects of the antenna number and m parameter of the Nakagami distribution. The obtained results proved that the pure opportunistic max-SNR algorithm has a spectral efficiency advantage over the others, even though it has a bad fairness characteristic in high number of users. The main contribution of this study is showing that the effects of the Nakagami-m fading parameter and opportunistic beamforming on the performance of the well-known scheduling algorithms.

Spectral Efficiency, Fairness, Scheduling, Opportunistic Beamforming, Nakagami-m Fading