Enhanced Relay Selection and Scheduling for Better Load Balancing in Multi-Hop Networks

Abstract

Relaying technology is likely to bring real progress to the next generation cellular networks due to its capability of boosting the system capacity and coverage. However, despite recent advances in relay deployment, some challenging problems still remain such as radio resource allocation and relay selection. The authors investigate both relay selection and scheduling strategy in order to improve the system radio capacity as well as the network load balancing. They propose a new path selection scheme based on the radio channel quality and the relay station load criteria. Performance analysis showed that the authors approach outperforms the existing path selection algorithms in terms of outage probability and global throughput in the system, especially in high traffic conditions. It is revealed that most of the cell edge users which would be rejected when applying common selection scheme, can now have access to a selected relay station and achieve a high end-to-end throughput. A new scheduling strategy is proposed in the second part of this paper, on the basis of a dynamic subframe partitioning. Simulation results show that the outage probability is reduced and more balanced resource allocation is provided. Simulation results showed that some relay stations which were not able to offer any service with the fixed subframe partitioning, can achieve a high data rate with the authors proposed dynamic scheduling strategy.