In cellular network environments, where users are not evenly distributed across cells, overloaded base stations handling many users have difficulties in providing effective and fair services with their limited resources. Additionally, users at the cell edge may suffer from the potential problems resulting from low signal-to-interference ratio owing to the incessant interference from adjacent cells. In this paper, we propose a relay-assisted load balancing scheme to resolve these traffic imbalance. The proposed scheme can improve the performance of the overall network by utilizing relay stations to divert heavy traffic to other cells, and by adopting a partial frequency-reuse scheme to mitigate inter-cell interference. Each user and relay station calculates its own utility influence in the neighboring candidates for reassociation and decides whether to stay or move to another cell presenting the maximum total network utility increment. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the overall network fairness to users by improving the performance of cell boundary users without degrading the total network throughput. We achieve a system performance gain of 16 ∼ 35% when compared with conventional schemes, while ensuring fairness among users.

In this paper, cell searching and direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation methods are proposed for mobile relay stations with a uniform linear arrays in OFDM-based cellular systems. The proposed methods can improve the performance of cell searching and DoA estimation, even when there exist symbol timing offsets among the signals received from adjacent base stations and Doppler frequency shifts caused by the movement of the mobile relay station. The performances and computational complexities of the proposed cell searching and DoA estimation methods are evaluated by computer simulation under a mobile WiMAX environment.

In this paper, we evaluate the downlink performance of Transparent mode (T-mode) and Non-Transparent mode (NT-mode) in a two-hop cellular system based on IEEE 802.16j. In particular, we evaluate the performance in terms of the system capacity, optimal resource allocation, and outage probability using Monte Carlo simulation with various system parameters such as different Frequency Reuse Factors (FRFs) and the distance between Base Station (BS) and Relay Station (RS). To analyze the Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR) of the access and relay links, an SINR model is introduced for cellular multihop systems considering intra- and inter-cell interferences. Then, we present a method of optimal resource allocation for the Access Zone (AZ) and Relay Zone (RZ) to maximize the system capacity. Consequently, the simulation results provide an insight into choosing the appropriate RS position and optimal resource allocation. Through numerical examples, it is found that the FRFs of two and three are good choices to achieve the highest capacity with low outage in T- and NT-modes, respectively.

In this paper, we study an opportunistic scheduling scheme for the TDMA wireless network with relay stations. We model the time-varying channel condition of a wireless link as a stochastic process. Based on this model, we formulate an optimization problem for the opportunistic scheduling scheme that maximizes the expected system throughput while satisfying the QoS constraint of each user. In the opportunistic scheduling scheme for the system without relay stations, each user has only one communication path between the base station and itself, and thus only user selection is considered. However, in our opportunistic scheduling scheme for the system with relay stations, since there may exist multiple paths between the base station and a user, not only user selection but also path selection for the scheduled user is considered. In addition, we also propose an opportunistic time-sharing method for time-slot sharing between base station and relay stations. With the opportunistic time-sharing method, our opportunistic scheduling provides opportunistic resource sharing in three places in the system: user selection in a time-slot, path selection for the selected user, and time-slot sharing between base station and relay stations. Simulation results show that as the number of places that opportunistic resource sharing is applied to increases, the performance improvement also increases.

In this letter, a mobile relay station (MRS) for vehicles with beamforming antennas is considered to increase the reliability of transmission link, especially for the MRS at cell boundary. Joint methods for cell searching and DoA estimation are proposed to form a beam in the direction of target BS while nulling interferences from adjacent BSs, especially for IP-based cellular systems employing break-before-make handover or make-before-break handover. The proposed cell searching and DoA estimation methods are evaluated by computer simulation under the environment of IEEE 802.16e (WiBro).

It has become very important to study the lightning surges that flow into telecommunications equipment because of the increased use of circuits susceptible to excess voltage. This paper reports for the first time simultaneous measurements of distributed lightning current at many positions in a mountain-top radio relay station caused by natural direct lightning strikes. More than 90% of the direct lightning current flowed from the lightning rod to the ground through building structural components such as antenna tower legs, waveguides, and so on, with the high frequency components of the lightning current tending to flow into the outside parts of those structural components. And then, 25 to 43 % of the lightning current flowed out again to outside telecommunications cables and power lines because the lightning current raised the station's ground potential. Based on these measurements, to help predict lightning current which is dangerous to telecommunications equipment, lightning current occurrence probabilities at the waveguide and cables were estimated by analyzing the distribution ratios between the current in those components.