Greening Wireless Relay Networks: An SNR-Aware Approach

Abstract

With the exploding popularity of wireless communication, the radio spectrum has become a scarce commodity. To further improve the network capacity, various solutions have been proposed to increase spectrum efficiency and network throughput. Small cell network is one of these new trends for next generation mobile network design. One model is using relay stations (RS) as small cell providers to achieve extended coverage, lower cost, and higher network capacity. Considering multiple related physical constraints such as channel capacity, signal to noise ratio ( SNR ) requirement of subscribers, relay power and network topology, this paper studies a joint signal-aware RS placement and power allocation problem with multiple base stations in wireless relay networks. We presented approximation schemes which first find a minimum number of RS, using maximum transmission power, to cover all the subscribers meeting each SNR requirement, and then ensure communications between any subscriber to a base station by adjusting the transmission power of each RS. Numerical results are presented to confirm the theoretical analysis of our schemes, and to show strong performances of our solutions.