Modelling Angle Spread Autocorrelations and the Impact on Multi-User Diversity Gains

One way of modelling the wireless channel is in a statistical manner, based on a few parameters describing the characteristics of the environment. In most current wireless channel models, these key parameters are assumed independent between separate links, i.e. on the channels modelling the propagation between one base station and several mobile stations, or one mobile station and several base stations. In practice, dependencies between these wireless channels is expected and as a consequence, system performance evaluations based on models with independent links may be inaccurate. Herein, we consider simulations of a system that depend on the spatial nature of the channel. In particular, we study a system with multi-user scheduling using a single carrier. We investigate the impact of angle spread correlations on multi-user diversity gains using opportunistic scheduling. To facilitate this, a novel method of modelling the angle spread correlations for multi-user system simulations is developed. It is shown that in systems with multiple user scheduling, modelling the angle spread autocorrelation is necessary to obtain reliable system performance results, especially as the number of simultaneous scheduled users increases.