Spectrum Partitioning and Relay Positioning for Cellular System Enhanced with Two-Hop Fixed Relay Nodes

Abstract

This paper investigates two issues of cellular engineering for cellular systems enhanced with two-hop fixed relay nodes (FRNs): spectrum partitioning and relay positioning, under the assumption of frequency reuse distance being equal to one. A channel-dependent spectrum partitioning scheme is proposed. According to this scheme, the ensemble mean of signal-to-interference-ratio on respective sets of links are taken into account to determine the bandwidths assigned to links connecting base station (BS) and FRNs, those connecting FRNs and mobile terminals (MTs) and those connecting BS and MTs. The proper FRN positioning is formulated as a constraint optimization problem, which tries to maximize the mean user data rate while at the same time ensures in probability 95% users being better served than in conventional cellular systems without relaying. It is demonstrated with computer simulations that FRN positioning has a strong impact on system performance. In addition, when FRNs can communicate with BS over line-of-sight channels the FRN enhanced cellular system with our proposed spectrum partitioning can remarkably outperform that with a known channel-borrowing based scheme and the conventional cellular systems without relaying. Simulation results also show that with proper FRN positioning the proposed spectrum partitioning scheme is robust against the unreliability of links connecting BS and FRNs.