Joint cooperative diversity and proportional fair scheduling in OFDMA relay systems

Previously proposed technique called joint cooperative diversity and scheduling (JCDS) has been shown to increase aggregate throughput of multiuser OFDMA relay networks significantly while being able to maintain per-link throughput when the number of relays is high enough. This paper proposes a new technique so-called joint cooperative diversity and proportional fair scheduling (JCPFS) for the multiuser OFDMA relay networks which sacrifices a small amount of the aggregate throughput in return for significant improvement in the per-link throughput. Unlike JCDS, JCPFS provides increases in both aggregate and per-link throughputs as the number of users increases. The throughput performance of JCPFS is characterized by delay spread of the channels and its effect is shown by simulation.