A method and apparatus is disclosed herein for scheduling and transmission for downlink multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). In one embodiment, the method comprises allocating a subset of time-frequency resources in the time-frequency plane to each distinct bin class, where each bin class comprises one or more bins of user terminals across the topology, and wherein user terminals in the one or more bins of each bin class are served across the topology by the subset of time-frequency resources. The method also comprises performing joint downlink MU-MIMO transmission using a plurality of bin class-dependent wireless transmission architectures at the plurality of base stations, where one or more bin classes is associated with one of the plurality of bin class-dependent architectures, and where each of the plurality of bin class-dependent architectures use different combinations of scheduling training and MU-MIMO transmission across the topology.