Analysis of subcarrier pairing in a cellular OFDMA relay link

Abstract

We consider a cellular OFDMA relay link consisting of a base station (BS), an infrastructure-based amplify-and-forward relay node (RN) and N active mobile user equipments (UEs). We study how to optimally pair the BS-RN subcarriers with the RN-UE subcarriers when the K subcarriers in the RN-UE channel are assigned for the UEs using round robin scheduling. The main contribution is to analyze the performance of the system by deriving closed-form expressions for average end-to-end SNR and capacity. The calculated measures facilitate performance evaluation that illustrates the benefit of channel-adaptive subcarrier pairing over fixed pairing.