Bandwidth sharing for relaying in cellular systems

We investigate bandwidth allocation in next generation cellular systems employing relays similar to LTE advanced systems with type-I relays. We jointly optimize the bandwidth and power usage under constraints on required rate, bandwidth and transmit power. We study scenarios wherein, the relay acts as a forwarder for multiple User Equipments (UEs/users) in both uplink and/or downlink. This includes scenarios when the relay has its own data to send along with forwarding the data of other users. We examine the weighted power minimization problem for relaying with multiple users. We also show specific results with N user scenario and also single user case in order to understand how the bandwidth and power are allocated. Numerical evaluations with N users on a three sector LTE-A cell employing Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) indicate that power savings of at least 3 dB can be achieved by optimizing over both bandwidth and power.