Association of mobile stations in cellular networks with relay nodes

Cooperative relaying is adopted as a possible candidate to address network coverage and capacity limitations in 4G cellular networks. In this paper we investigate the offline problem of associating mobile stations to telecommunication nodes in a cooperative relay network. We propose a heuristic algorithm to determine how mobile stations should associate to the base station or relay nodes so that overall resource consumption is minimized and compare it against two other conventional algorithms. Simulation results show that the proposed mobile association scheme outperforms the conventional schemes in a heterogeneous environment.