Multihop cellular networks (MCNs) have drawn tremendous attention due to its high throughput and extensive coverage. However, there are still three issues not well addressed. With the existence of relay stations (RSs), how to efficiently allocate frequency resource to relay links becomes a challenging design issue. For mobile stations (MSs) near the cell edge, cochannel interference (CCI) become severe, which significantly affects the network performance. Furthermore, the unbalanced user distribution will result in traffic congestion and inability to guarantee quality of service (QoS). To address these problems, we propose a quantitative study on adaptive resource allocation schemes by jointly considering interference coordination (IC) and load balancing (LB) in MCNs. In this paper, we focus on the downlink of OFDMA-based MCNs with time division duplex (TDD) mode, and analyze the characteristics of resource allocation according to IEEE 802.16j/m specification. We also design a novel frequency reuse scheme to mitigate interference and maintain high spectral efficiency, and provide practical LB-based handover mechanisms which can evenly distribute the traffic and guarantee users' QoS. Our study shows that our scheme not only meets the requirement on coverage, but also improves the throughput while accommodating more users in MCNs.

Recently, improving energy efficiency has been a new tendency in wireless relay communication. However, the introduction of relay technology may increase the system capacity, but is often followed by a more severe energy‐efficiency problem when compared with traditional single‐hop system. In this study, based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing‐based frequency‐selective channel of amplify‐and‐forward relay link, a suboptimal two‐step power allocation algorithm of subcarriers is proposed to maximise the energy efficiency. The proposal includes two steps. First, a suboptimal subcarrier matching is achieved for introducing a virtual direct link, which may reduce the dimensionality of the power allocation. Second, the allocation problem of relay network is simplified as that in traditional cellular network. Thus, the optimal power allocation of virtual direct link can be obtained by one‐dimensional search method. Furthermore, the effects of rate and power constraints on the energy‐efficiency problem are analysed. Simulation shows that the suboptimal solution of the proposed algorithm is very close to the optimal solution, and the proposed energy efficient power allocation method can achieve the highest energy efficiency, compared with the rate adaptive and margin adaptive optimisations.

By incorporating relay technologies into cellular systems, multi-hop relay networks (MRNs) can provide higher throughput and wider coverage, but it is impossible to guarantee quality of service (QoS) requirements for users at the cell edge and in hot spots due to severe co-channel interference (CCI) and load imbalance. This paper proposes an adaptive resource allocation scheme with a joint consideration of interference coordination (IC) & load balancing (LB), and analyzes the downlink of orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based MRNs with time division duplex (TDD) mode. We present a novel frequency reuse scheme for MRNs to mitigate CCI and maintain high spectral efficiency. We also provide practical LB-based handover mechanisms to evenly distribute users and guarantee the users' QoS. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our scheme not only satisfies the requirement of coverage probability, but also improves the throughput and accommodates more users in MRNs.

In current multi-hop relay networks (MRNs), normally the communication path is not optimized, especially when two mobile stations (MSs) attached to the same relay station (RS) need to communicate with each other. In this paper, a novel data transmission scheme: administrable and controllable local forwarding for OFDMA-TDD based two-hop relay cellular networks, is proposed. In the local forwarding mode, data transmission between two MSs attached to the same RS is forwarded without necessarily being sent to the base station (BS). Thereby the spectral efficiency is improved. And then two cost based relay selection schemes (RSSs) are proposed for the efficient usage of local forwarding mode. The first is a modified traditional RSS (RSS-MT), which implements local forwarding after relay selection. And the second is a local forwarding-based RSS (RSS-LF), which takes the advantages of the local forwarding into account during relay selection. Numerical and simulation results show that the local forwarding transmission schemes can improve the system capacity greatly. Moreover, the performance of RSS-LF is shown to be superior to that of RSS-MT.