A NETWORK ENTRY PROTOCOL AND AN OFDMA SYMBOL ALLOCATION SCHEME FOR NON-TRANSPARENT RELAY STATIONS IN IEEE 802.16j MMR NETWORKS

A relay station (RS) in IEEE 802.16j mobile multi-hop relay (MMR) networks provides access links to far-off subscriber stations (SSs) and hidden subscriber stations. The RS also relays data from a base station and other RSs while maintaining backward compatibility with legacy subscriber stations in existing IEEE 802.16 networks. Much research is being performed to finalize the standard, however, how an RS in the MMR network is assigned OFDMA symbol resources as an MMR network is enlarged by adding more RSs is not certain. In this paper, we propose a new network entry protocol for non-transparent RSs to handle hidden SSs and far-off SSs. A new OFDMA symbol allocation scheme for RSs in the MMR network is investigated in the literature. We have also conducted a numerical analysis. The numerical analysis includes basic formulas and conditions to calculate not only the maximum number of OFDMA symbols the non-transparent RS can obtain but also the maximum hop count a base station can have.