On the integration of resource sharing and relaying paradigms to improve the efficiency of B3G systems

Recently, resource sharing has emerged as a new paradigm to improve the overall efficiency of a network, by efficiently exchanging and sharing different resources, such as spectrum and base stations, on a slow and fast basis. Moreover, relaying has gained wide interest and acceptance in the research community by emerging as a key technology. However, due to its challenges like the allocation of required radio resources for relays, and the sensitivity to the selection of relaying routes, efficient relaying requires a well-designed radio resource allocation strategy in order to achieve the targeted performance gains. Clearly, these revolutionary new ideas have a lot of potential to spark new ways of using novel radio network topologies and to create even a new kind of applications and services that can benefit the whole society. In this paper, the efficient integration of both resource sharing and relaying concepts is discussed. Challenging radio resource allocation scenarios are depicted and subsequently analyzed. Furthermore, open issues and challenges are addressed to show the limitation of current systems and the need for further advanced studies. This concept paper serves as a baseline for further exploration, prompting the need for deep investigations, simulation results and performance assessment.