Self-organized spatial reuse scheduling in multihop cellular systems

Multihop cellular systems using fixed relay stations are the most promising candidate in the next generation of cellular systems. In order to maximize multihop transmission gains, multihop cellular systems have to exploit an efficient multiple access scheme, which controls the interference of simultaneous transmission links. As one promising way of achieving the goal, we propose a spatial reuse scheduling algorithm that utilizes a self-organizing concept to maximize the system throughput in multihop cellular systems. In our proposed algorithm, each relay station (RS) can infer the buffer state of its neighbor RS’s, and determine its own action (a choice among receive, transmit, and shut down) based only on the preamble information from its base station (BS) without any centralized scheduling information. The proposed algorithm is self-organizing in the sense that only the local behavior of each RS is sufficient to maximize the system throughput, and it uses the implicit coordination of a RS’s action instead of aiming for perfect coordination. The proposed algorithm has the advantages of less complexity and a significantly smaller overhead when compared to centralized scheduling schemes, since the BS needs no information about the buffer states of RSs and channel qualities between RSs and users.