A Joint Resource Allocation and Routing Scheme for the IEEE 802.16j Multi-hop Relay Networks

Routing (or path selection) is one of the key issues of multi-hop relay networks such as the IEEE 802.16j. Moreover, the allocation of appropriate resource such as bandwidth should not only be made in accordance with the paths selected, but the utilization of radio resource of an entire cell should also be maximized. Due to this interdependency between the problems of resource allocation and routing, it is desired these two problems are addressed simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a joint resource allocation and routing scheme for an OFDMA-based multi-hop cellular system. This scheme uses a polynomial time heuristic algorithm called Multi-Dimensional Multi-choice Knapsack Problem (MMKP) in order to find an approximate solution maximizing the total downlink throughput. In the simulation results, we show that the proposed scheme finds a sub-optimal solution which is superior to a link quality-based routing scheme, but slightly worse than the optimal solution.