Contiguous Multi-User Scheduling And Power Control For 5g-Nr Uplink

5G massive MIMO deployments up to 64T64R (64 Transmit and 64 Receive) antenna arrays are gaining traction, in part due to the smaller size of such arrays suitable for mid-band spectrum (2-5 GHz). A scheduling algorithm that can aggressively pair many UEs (User Equipment) on the same time-frequency resources is essential to fully derive the benefits of such an array. In this paper, an uplink scheduler design is proposed based on RME (Recursive Maximal Expansion) that ensures contiguous resource allocation and power constraint for each UE, while maximizing MU (Multi-User) MIMO (MultipleInput Multiple-Output) gains by selecting and pairing UE groups based on the sum-PF (Proportional Fair) metric. We show, using realistic system level simulations, that up to 100% average cell-throughput gains can be achieved by MU-MIMO over SU (Single-User) MIMO in dense urban micro cell deployment scenarios presenting an attractive proposition for massive MIMO array deployments. It is observed that power control parameters play a critical role and should be optimized considering scheduler behavior, especially for cell-edge throughput improvement.