An Efficient IR-HARQ Power Allocation for Relay-Aided Cellular Networks

Abstract

Energy-efficient and reliable data transmission is a challenging task in wireless relay networks (WRNs). Energy efficiency in cellular networks has received significant attention because of the present need for reduced energy consumption, thereby maintaining the profitability of networks, which in turn makes these networks “greener”. The urban cell topography needs more energy to cover the total area of the cell. The base station does not cover the entire area in a given topography and adding more number of base stations is a cost prohibitive one. Energy-efficient relay placement model which calculates the maximum cell coverage is proposed in this work that covers all sectors and also an energy-efficient incremental redundancy-hybrid automatic repeat request (IR-HARQ) power allocation scheme to improve the reliability of the network by improving the overall network throughput is proposed. An IR-HARQ power allocation method maximizes the average incremental mutual information at each round, and its throughput quickly converges to the ergodic channel capacity as the number of retransmissions increases. Simulation results show that the proposed IR-HARQ power allocation achieves full channel capacity with average transmission delay and maintains good throughput under less power consumption. Also the impact of relaying performance on node distances between relay station and base station as well as between user and relay station and relay height for line of sight conditions are analyzed using full decode and forward (FDF) and partial decode and forward (PDF) relaying schemes. Compared to FDF scheme, PDF scheme provides better performance and allows more freedom in the relay placement for an increase in cell coverage.