Utility-based mechanism for broadcast recipient maximization in WiMAX relay networks

This paper studies the resource allocation problem in downlink broadcast services in the IEEE 802.16j WiMAX relay networks, where the objective to serve as many Mobile Stations (MSs) as possible with the given resource budget. Solving the problem is not trivial because allocating different amounts of the resource to the Multihop Relay Base Station (MR-BS) and Relay Stations (RSs) yields different network topologies and thus diverse routing paths from the MR-BS to the MSs. Since existing approaches only provide inflexible solution (i.e., in each step of the allocation process, the fraction of resource released by the MR-BS is reassigned to the selected RS entirely) or the solution that is built on a limited network scenario (i.e., the routing paths from the MR-BS to MSs is predetermined), we propose a Utility-based Resource Allocation (URA) algorithm to settle the problem. In particular, we define the utility of a relay path, which is used by URA to assess the quality of a relay path. The performance evaluation via simulations under different network scenarios and resource budget shows that URA can make utilization more efficient so that it can serve more MSs than existing approach.