Proposed relay method with P-MP structure of IEEE 802.16-2004

This paper presents a relay method with a P-MP (point to multipoint) structure by extending the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard in order to expand the coverage area (2004). In the proposed relay method, a RS (relay station) sends a polling message for the SSs (subscriber station) assigned to the former to forward uplink data in terms of the contention opportunities in the uplink subframe, and obtains a contention request period to communicate between the RS and these SSs. The feature of the proposed relay method is that it can be applied to TDD (time division duplex) and FDD (frequency division duplex), and both BS (base station) and RS operating at the same and at different carrier frequencies respectively. In this paper, we evaluated the basic characteristics of the proposed relay method in terms of throughput and delay time through computer simulations. We show that the introduction of the proposed relay method is effective in expanding the coverage area, and that the proposed relay method has an effect on the increase of the system throughput without affecting the delay time by adjusting the time interval parameter for BW requests of SSs assigned to the RS correctly