Energy-efficient two-hop LTE resource allocation in high speed trains with moving relays

High-speed railway system equipped with moving relay stations placed on the middle of the ceiling of each train wagon is investigated. The users inside the train are served in two hops via the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. The objective of this work is to maximize the number of served users by respecting a specific quality-of-service constraint while minimizing the total power consumption of the eNodeB and the moving relays. We propose an efficient algorithm based on the Hungarian method to find the optimal resource allocation over the LTE resource blocks in order to serve the maximum number of users with the minimum power consumption. Moreover, we derive a closed-form expression for the power allocation problem. Our simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme and compare it with various previously developed algorithms as well as with the direct transmission scenario.