An Overview of Radio Resource Management in Relay-Enhanced OFDMA-Based Networks

Researchers in both academia and industry have accepted OFDMA as the most appropriate air-interface for the emerging broadband wireless access networks and standards. A number of IEEE working groups and various research forums are focusing on developing relay and mesh-enabled networks with cooperative communication features. Among these research efforts are IEEE 802.11s, IEEE 802.16j/m, and 3GPP's advanced long term evolution (LTE-advanced). The combination of OFDMA with relaying techniques provides rich opportunities for cost-effective and high-performance networks. To exploit such opportunities requires intelligent radio resource management (RRM) algorithms. Although a number of publications have highlighted the important and challenging issues involved in designing RRM algorithms for OFDMA networks, only recently a number of papers have investigated relay-enhanced OFDMA-based multicellular networks. By and large, the literature indicates that these issues constitute a hot research topic that will continue to attract interest. This paper provides a survey of the current literature on OFDMA networks enhanced with decode-and-forward relaying and provides their link to earlier literature in non-OFDMA networks. In addition, a rich list of references is provided to direct the readers toward some of the emerging techniques.