Coding-Aware Proportional-Fair Scheduling in OFDMA Relay Networks

In recent years, OFDMA relay networks have become a key component in the 4G standards (e.g., IEEE 802.16j, 3GPP LTE-Advanced) for broadband wireless access. When numerous bidirectional flows pass through the relay stations in an OFDMA relay network that supports various interactive applications, plenty of network coding opportunities arise and can be leveraged to enhance the throughput. In this paper, we study the proportional-fair scheduling problem in the presence of network coding in OFDMA relay networks. Considering the tradeoff between performance and overhead, we propose two models, global approach (GA) and local approach (LA), under which the corresponding problems are shown both NP-hard. For the GA model, we show that it cannot be approximated within some constant factor. Hence, we propose a heuristic algorithm with low time complexity. For the LA model, we propose a theoretical polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS), and also present a practical greedy algorithm with approximation factor of 1/2. Simulation results show that our algorithms can achieve significant throughput improvement over a state-of-the-art noncoding scheme.