Load-Aware Relay Selection in LTE - A System via Global Differentiated-Fairness Control

Relay selection is a crucial problem for LTE-advanced (LTE-A) networks in order to improve the performance of users in the cell-edge or the hot-spot areas. Relay selection needs to not only consider the distance, the channel quality or the differentiated throughput require of the network, but also take system traffic load into account. It is worth noting that the unbalanced traffic load often degrades throughput performance of the user under the backhaul resource constraint. To address this problem, we in this paper propose a scheme for joint relay selection and long-term resource allocation in interference-coordination enabled LTE-A networks. We show that the traffic load can be better balanced via controlling the global differentiated-fairness. Simulation results demonstrate that compared with conventional relay selection schemes, our proposed scheme can enhance the performance in terms of the global differentiated-fairness as well as throughput for hot-spot or cell-edge areas.