Joint improvements for capacity and power-efficiency of mobile WiMAX by relaying schemes

The mobile WiMAX standard promises to enable low-cost mobile Internet applications over extensive areas and to meet the capacity requirements by combining advanced multiple input multiple output (MIMO) and relay transmission techniques. In this paper, we propose a solution to increase the channel capacity between wireless links and to conserve the average required uplink transmission power consumption simultaneously through deploying relay stations' (RSs) locations judiciously. Two relaying schemes, analogue (amplify and forward) relaying and digital (decode and forward) relaying from a mobile device to the base station (BS) through a relay node, are adopted with weighting filters to increase the channel capacity. Based on the enhanced channel capacity, a new manipulation way to save power is introduced by deploying RSs strategically where the branch-and-bound (BB) algorithm is applied to determine the placements of RSs. Our simulation results demonstrate the significant improvement of network capacity by applying the weighting filter techniques and the great power saving of the average total network power by utilizing the BB algorithm to arrange RSs locations. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.