Fairness-Aware Joint Routing and Scheduling in OFDMA-Based Cellular Fixed Relay Networks

Relaying and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) are the accepted technologies for emerging wireless communications standards. The activities in many wireless standardization bodies and forums, for example IEEE 802.16 j/m and LTE-Advanced, attest to this fact. The availability or lack thereof of efficient radio resource management (RRM) could make or mar the opportunities in these networks. This paper therefore provides a comprehensive RRM algorithm for OFDMA-based multi-cellular fixed relay networks in a way to ensure fairness among users with minimal impact on the network throughput (in contrast, pure opportunistic RRM techniques always favor users with good channel conditions). Unlike the majority of works in the literature, our proposed scheme is queue-aware and jointly performs routing, fair scheduling, and load balancing among cell nodes. The routing strategy has inherent learning ability and it dynamically converges to better routes.