Power-bandwidth tradeoff in multiuser relay channels with opportunistic scheduling

The goal of this paper is to understand the key merits of multihop relaying techniques jointly in terms of their energy efficiency and spectral efficiency advantages in the presence of multiuser diversity gains from opportunistic (i.e., channel-aware) scheduling and identify the regimes and conditions in which relay-assisted multiuser communication provides a clear advantage over direct multiuser communication. For this purpose, we use Shannon-theoretic tools to analyze the tradeoff between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency (known as the power-bandwidth tradeoff) over a fading multiuser relay channel with K users in the asymptotic regime of large (but finite) number of users (i.e., dense network). Benefiting from the extreme-value theoretic results of [1], we characterize the power-bandwidth tradeoff and the associated energy and spectral efficiency measures of the bandwidth-limited high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and power-limited low SNR regimes, and utilize them in investigating the large system behavior of the multiuser relay channel as a function of the number of users and physical channel SNRs. Our analysis results in very accurate closed-form formulas in the large (but finite) K regime that quantify energy and spectral efficiency performance, and provides insights on the impact of multihop relaying and multiuser diversity techniques on the power-bandwidth tradeoff.