Performance of Cellular Networks with Relays and Centralized Scheduling

Future cellular wireless networks could include multi-hop transmission through relays. We propose a centralized downlink scheduling scheme in a cellular network with a small number of relays. The scheduling scheme has the property that it guarantees stability of the user queues for the largest set of arrival rates. We obtain throughput results by simulation for various scenarios and study the effect of number of relays, relay transmit power relative to the base station power and the effect of distributing a given total power between the base station and different number of relays. We also present results for the case without channel fading to determine what fraction of the throughput gain is achieved from diversity reception. We find that with four relays deployed in each sector it is possible to achieve a 70% throughput gain excluding the signaling overhead.