Radio resource management for user-relay assisted OFDMA-based wireless networks

Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based relay assisted networks are important for current and next-generation wireless networks since they have great potential to provide high data rate to users at anywhere, anytime. Towards that end, fixed relay assisted OFDMA networks are commonly utilized by the operators. However, they require supplementary costly infrastructure. User-relay assisted OFDMA-based networks are promising candidates to fulfill the demanding coverage and capacity requirements of future wireless networks in a cost efficient way. Thus, they have become popular as a complementary solution to fixed relay networks. Generic frame structure that divides the resource allocation frame into two subframes is mostly used in the literature for fixed and user-relay assisted networks in which it is assumed that a user can act as a destination and a relay simultaneously. However, it may be difficult to apply this assumption to practical systems because of the limitations of the current transceiver design. Thus, we propose a novel frame structure for user-relay assisted OFDMA-based wireless networks in order to cope with these drawbacks. The efficient radio resource management algorithms including relay selection and resource allocation are developed in order to exploit the opportunities of the proposed frame structure.