Effect of cooperative and selection relaying schemes on multiuser diversity in downlink cellular systems with relays

In this paper, we investigate the effect of cooperative and selection relaying schemes on multiuser diversity in downlink cellular systems with fixed relay stations (RSs). Each mobile station (MS) is either directly connected to a base station (BS) and/or connected to a relay station. We first derive closed-form solutions or upper-bound of the ergodic and outage capacities of four different downlink data relaying schemes: A direct scheme, a relay scheme, a selection scheme, and a cooperative scheme. The selection scheme selects the best access link between the BS and an MS. For all schemes, the capacity of the BS-RS link is assumed to be always larger than that of RS-MS link. Half-duplex channel use and repetition based relaying schemes are assumed for relaying operations. We also analyze the system capacity in a multiuser diversity environment in which a maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scheduler is used at a base station. The result shows that the selection scheme outperforms the other three schemes in terms of link ergodic capacity, link outage capacity, and system ergodic capacity. Furthermore, our results show that cooperative and selection diversity techniques limit the performance gain that could have been achieved by the multiuser diversity technique.