Optimal Resource Allocation in Relay-Assisted Cellular Networks With Partial CSI

Emerging cellular networks are likely to handle users with heterogeneous quality of service requirements attending to the nature of their underlying service application, the quality of their wireless equipment, or even their contract terms. While sharing the same physical resources (power, bandwidth, transmission time), the utility they get from using them may be very different and arbitrage is needed to optimize the global operation of the network. In this respect, resource allocation strategies maximizing network utility under practical constraints are investigated in this paper. In particular, we focus on a cellular network with half-duplex, MIMO terminals and relaying infrastructure in the form of fixed and dedicated relay stations. Whereas orthogonal-frequency-division multiple access is assumed, it is seen as a frequency diversity enabler since path loss is the only channel state information (CSI) known at the transmitters, which is refreshed periodically. With this setup, the performance of a state-of-the art relay-assisted transmission protocol is characterized in terms of the ergodic achievable rates, for which novel concave lower bounds are developed. The use of these bounds allows us to derive two efficient algorithms computing resource allocations in polynomial time, which address the optimization of the uplink and downlink directions jointly. First, a global optimization algorithm providing one Pareto optimal solution maximizing network utility during the validity period of one CSI is studied, which acts as a performance upper bound. Second, a sequential optimization algorithm maximizing network utility frame by frame is considered as a simpler alternative. The performance of both schemes has been compared in practical scenarios, giving special attention to the performance-complexity and throughput-fairness tradeoffs.