WiMax (IEEE 802.16) and LTE (long term evolution) as the latest developed standards are envisioned as the technology for the next generation wireless communications. Both of these standards have used orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) for multiple access...[ Read more ]

WiMax (IEEE 802.16) and LTE (long term evolution) as the latest developed standards are envisioned as the technology for the next generation wireless communications. Both of these standards have used orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) for multiple access

Resource allocation and relay path selection in OFDMA have been well studied. Traditional Schemes have approached this problem mostly in a single cell environment without inter-cell interference.

This research work addressed the effect of multi-cell architecture on resource allocation and path selection problems and proposed a novel iterative approach, in which we jointly allocate resources (subchannels and power) and select path (Relay Stations (RSs) or Base Station (BS)) for each user. The scheme has also considered the fairness issue for the users at the cell edge and proposed a low complexity fairness scheme. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with a traditional scheme that does not take into account the inter-cell interference.

From simulation results, we demonstrate the effect of inter-cell interference on system performance. We show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional one significantly under inter-cell interference in both cell throughput and outage probability.