Spatial Resource Reuse in the Multi-Hop Cellular Networks: Difficulties and Benefits

The introduction of relays into legacy cellular networks is gaining more of an interest in the 4th generation (4G) wireless systems. In the presence of relays, simultaneous transmission of both base stations (BS) and relay stations (RS) on the same resources is possible, and consequently much higher throughput can be achieved. However, determining the set of links which will be turned on at the same time is usually considered a NP-complete combinatorial problem. Moreover, it requires cooperation between BSs and RSs of independent cells. In such context, we briefly address the difficulties of spatial resource reuse from the graph-theoretical perspective. Next, our focus shifts to developing a simple but efficient radio resource management algorithm which enables the spatial resource reuse, the pricing- based radio resource management (PRRM) strategy. The PRRM performs spatial reuse for interference-free users operating in the high signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) region, while guaranteeing the signal quality of interference-susceptible users usually located near the coverage boundary. By applying the PRRM, we evaluate the potential benefits of the spatial resource reuse.