Exploiting Cooperative Diversity and Spatial Reuse in Multihop Cellular Networks

Multihop cellular networks employ relay stations to enhance end-to-end link quality in terms of capacity, coverage and reliability. Techniques like cooperative relaying and spatial reuse can further improve the network performance. Efficient resource allocation algorithms are required to exploit the potential advantages. In this paper we first introduce three relaying schemes, and show that there is a trade-off between cooperative diversity and spatial reuse. Then we propose an efficient resource allocation algorithm to fairly allocate the resource among users in multihop cellular networks. The algorithm exploits both spatial reuse and cooperative diversity. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the algorithms with only cooperative diversity or only spatial reuse.