Cooperation in 5G Heterogeneous Networking: Relay Scheme Combination and Resource Allocation

In 5G heterogeneous networking, it is promising to integrate different wireless networks to provide higher data rate. This paper models the integrated system as a receiver frequency division relay channel (RFDRC) and studies how to improve the transmission rate by combining decode-forward (DF), compress-forward (CF), and amplify-forward (AF) schemes. First, we establish clear criterions on how to select a relay scheme among DF, CF, and AF schemes and prove that the CF outperforms AF for all possible configurations. Based on the scheme selection criterions, we propose a hybrid DF-CF scheme which takes advantage of both DF and CF schemes in RFDRC. A near-optimal resource allocation is presented for the DF-CF-based system, leading to a new achievable rate for RFDRC. For ease of implementation, we further put forward a hybrid DF-AF scheme and reconsider the joint bandwidth and power allocation. Two suboptimal resource allocation solutions are established. In particular, when source frequency band and relay frequency band have equivalent bandwidth, we show that the proposed hybrid DF-AF scheme can achieve the concave envelope of the maximum between DF rate and AF rate. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes bring significant gains for RFDRC.