A hybrid radio resource management scheme for uplink relay-based cellular networks

Multi-hop relays will be deployed as one of the promising technologies for future cellular networks to enhance the performance of cell boundary users and to reduce deployment and operating cost. However, they have many challenges which include signaling overhead and latency in order to be practically deployed due to a hierarchical multi-hop structure, and the situation is much severer in uplink case. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel hybrid radio resource management scheme, which combines a hybrid multiple access scheme and a window-based virtual bandwidth multiple access scheme, in an uplink OFDMA system based on IEEE 802.16j. The system-level simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly reduces both the delay and signaling overhead, compared with the conventional schemes.