A stepwise radio resource allocation scheme considering load balancing in OFDM-based relay/cellular networks

Macrocell cellular networks utilizing relay nodes with low transmission power have emerged as a new paradigm to meet the fast increasing capacity and coverage demands in Fourth-Generation-Long-Term Evolution (4G-LTE). For such a network, an efficient radio resource allocation scheme is critical to achieve a desirable mobile quality of service (QoS). This paper investigates a stepwise radio resource allocation (RRA) scheme in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based relay/cellular network. The proposed scheme is implemented by three procedures: mobile association, subcarrier allocation and load balancing. After mobile association, we choose greedy algorithm to maximize the system throughput during subcarrier allocation. Load balancing is applied to avoid system bottlenecks as well as improve the resource utilization. The main contribution of this work is that we take load balancing into consideration. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms than the conventional maximal received power scheme and minimum path-loss based scheme. It can significantly improve the system throughput and resource utilization.