Joint Allocation of Resource Blocks, Power, and Energy-Harvesting Relays in Cellular Networks

Relaying is a promising technique in cellular networks for improving system capacity and coverage. To facilitate the deployment of relays in remote areas without ready access to the electrical grid, energy-harvesting relays may be deployed. Energy-harvesting has been studied extensively for sensor networks, but it is still an open problem for cellular networks. In this paper, we study the problem of the joint allocation of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access resource blocks and transmission power to users in a cellular network with energy-harvesting relays. The energy-harvesting process is stochastically described by a time-varying Poisson process. We propose a new metric called survival probability as the selection criteria for an energy-harvesting relay to support data transmissions. We propose a survival probability-based resource allocation (SPRA) algorithm. The algorithm solves the joint problem of resource block allocation, power control, and associating relays to users in a cellular network. We show the achievable data rates of SPRA for different energy harvesting rates.