Fairness Schemes in 802.16j Mobile Multihop Relay Networks

Multihop relaying in WiMAX networks is considered a cost effective way to extend the coverage of the base stations, increase cell capacity, or both. In this paper, we consider deploying non-transparent relay stations for coverage extension and study the issue of fairness schemes in such networks. Since there are access and relay zones in both downlink and uplink frames and simultaneous transmissions are possible in the access zone, it is challenging to schedule resources optimally for serving subscriber stations in a fair manner. We evaluate the performance of well known fairness schemes such as max-min and proportional fairness in such networks. We also propose a new scheduling scheme, named subsection fairness that can achieve better throughput than traditional fairness schemes by maximizing bandwidth utilization. Our numerical results evaluate the performance of each scheduling scheme in terms of cell throughput and fairness.