Backhaul resource allocation in LTE-Advanced relaying systems

In 3GPP LTE-Advanced, relay is considered as an important means for extending cell coverage and improving capacity. Backhaul resource allocation needs to be carefully designed to achieve the performance advantage of relay. In this paper, we propose a two-step backhaul resource allocation scheme for an inband relaying system based on relay buffer level. The resource assignment to relays meets the actual traffic demand, takes into account the link quality of the backhaul link and the access link, and the resource partitioning between relays and macro UEs is then optimized. Our evaluations show that the proposed framework can improve the cell average and cell-edge user performance, for different deployment scenarios. This approach has very low complexity in implementation and the revision to current standard is very minimal.