Cost Effective Coverage Extension in 802.16j Mobile Multihop Relay Networks

WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) has emerged as a promising radio access technology for providing high speed broadband connectivity to subscribers over large geographic regions. New enhancements allow deployments of relay stations (RSs) that can extend the coverage of the base station (BS), increase cell capacity, or both. In this paper, we focus on deploying RSs for the purpose of coverage extension. We propose a simple scheduling scheme for serving the subscriber stations (SSs) in a fair manner and evaluate the performance of WiMAX networks with relays under this scheduling scheme. Through simulation and numerical analysis, we make several fundamental observations about cost-effective coverage in such networks.