Joint maximum number of transmissions handling for HARQ protocol in relay networks

Relaying is generally considered as a method to ensure capacity improvement and coverage extension in cellular systems. The additional communication traffic between a mobile station and a relay intermediately inserted into a link between RUE and BS requires additional considerations on HARQ protocol. In this paper, we propose a method to jointly and dynamically balance the maximum number of transmissions between the access link and relay link by taking into account the end to end error probability, HARQ latency and spectral efficiency.