Handoff Minimization Through a Relay Station Grouping Algorithm With Efficient Radio-Resource Scheduling Policies for IEEE 802.16j Multihop Relay Networks

The IEEE 802.16j standard has been developed to provide performance enhancement to the existing IEEE 802.16e network by incorporating the multihop relay (MR) technology. However, frequent handoffs and low spectrum-utilization issues that were not encountered in IEEE 802.16e may be incurred in IEEE 802.16j. The relay station (RS) grouping is one optional mechanism in the IEEE 802.16j MR standard to overcome these problems. The concept of RS grouping is to group neighboring RSs together to form an RS group, which can be regarded as a logical RS with larger coverage. In this paper, we investigate RS grouping performance enhancement in terms of throughput and handoff frequency. This paper designs an RS grouping algorithm to minimize handoffs by utilizing a greedy grouping policy: RS pairs with higher handoff rates will have higher priority for selection. The simulation results show that the handoff frequency of the considered MR network can significantly be reduced, and suitable RS grouping patterns can be derived using our grouping algorithm. In addition, we propose two centralized scheduling policies, i.e., the throughput-first (TF) policy to maximize the system throughput and the delay-first (DF) policy to minimize the average packet delay. By integrating our RS grouping algorithm and centralized scheduling algorithms, the simulation results indicate that, for the case of fixed users, groupings with smaller group sizes can result in better throughput performance. However, when user mobility is considered, the throughput value increases as the group size increases. Furthermore, we also show that the DF policy can both minimize the average packet delay and provide the fairness property among users with different traffic loads.