Fair scheduling and resource allocation for wireless cellular network with shared relays

This paper examines a shared relaying architecture for intercell interference mitigation in wireless cellular networks, where instead of deploying multiple separate relays within each cell sector, a single relay with multiple antennas is placed at the cell edge and is shared by multiple sectors. To maximize the benefit of shared relaying, resource allocation and the scheduling of users among the adjacent sectors need to be optimized jointly. This paper first provides a degree-of-freedom analysis as a motivation for the shared relay architecture, then formulates and solves a network utility maximization problem for a realistic shared relaying network, where zero-forcing beamforming is used at the relay to separate users spatially and multiple users are scheduled in the frequency domain to maximize frequency reuse. System-level simulations show that the incorporation of the shared relays can significantly improve the overall network utility, and increase the throughput of cell edge users in particular as compared to separate relaying.