Fair Resource Allocation for the Relay Backhaul Link in LTE-Advanced

In this work, we revisit the issue of fair resource allocation in relay-enhanced wireless networks. Our focus this time is on Type-1a relays as proposed for LTE-Advanced. The latter operate as out-band relays, i.e., the backhaul and relay access link use separate carrier frequencies. If carrier aggregation is applied at the macro base station, the backhaul carrier may also contain part of the macro access link. Assuming full buffer traffic on the downstream, we demonstrate how similar resource partitioning strategies at the base station as proposed for in-band relays can be also applied in the out-band case. Furthermore, we propose that for out-band relays, the backhaul link should be considered directly in the regular frequency-selective scheduling process for best performance vs. complexity trade-off. The presented results include the resource consumption and achievable throughput for a hot-spot scenario with 2 out-band relay nodes, as well as a comparison to the in-band case assuming same overall resource budget.