Dynamic Channel Switching for Downlink Relay-aided OFDMA Systems

Bin Da, Rui Zhang, and Chi Chung Ko

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering E4-05-45 Engineering Drive 3, National University of Singapore, 117576 Email:{dabin,elezhang,elekocc}@nus.edu.sg with dynamic channel switching in a typical cellular system is presented. In this system, each user can communicate with the Base Station (BS) either through direct path or relaying path. For each relaying path, AF technique and half-duplex transmission [7] are adopted. Specically, a joint optimization problem is formulated with consideration of power distribution, subcarrier selection in direct path or subcarrier paring in two-hop relaying path. The rest is organized as follows. The relay-aided OFDMA system and the formulated problem are introduced in section II. In section III, the optimal subcarrier selection criterion is analyzed, and a low complexity algorithm is then proposed. Section IV shows some simulation results to verify the system performance while Section V briey concludes this paper. II. S YSTEM MODEL AND PROBLEM FORMULATION The typical cellular system in a single cell is considered, which has one BS, R xed RSs and U users. The basic transmission paths are illustrated in Fig.1. Note that the BS can either transmit signal to users via direct path or relaying path with half-duplex operation, this feature extends our work presented in [8]. In Fig.1, the channel fading gains are explicitly provided for each path. To be specic, an , bn , dm represent r u ru the fading gains of BS-RS, BS-User, and RS-User paths, respectively. Furthermore, the Channel State Information (CSI) is assumed available at the BS so that centralized resource allocation can be implemented. In this system, the bandwidth of each subcarrier is assumed to be W = B/N , where B is the total system bandwidth and N is the overall number of subcarriers. In addition, it is assumed that xn is the signal transmitted to user u on u subcarrier n from the BS with the signal power given by 2 n E{ xn } = pn . Correspondingly, xm = m (an xn + vr ) ru u u ru r u is the signal transmitted to user u on subcarrier m from the 2 rth RS with power E{ xm } = pm , where m is the ru ru ru amplication factor at the rth RS for user u on subcarrier m. n n m Note that vr , vI , and vII are white noise on each subcarrier, equal to v0 = z0 W , with z0 being the noise power spectrum density. As given in [8], the capacity using AF relaying and halfduplex implementation for one specic subcarrier pair is CAF(r,u) = (W/2)log2 fr ,
(n,m)

AbstractA relay-aided OFDMA system model with dynamic channel switching is introduced in this paper. Specically, this model allows each user to communicate with the base station either through direct path or relaying path. The investigated problem is formulated as maximizing system capacity with joint consideration of power distribution, subcarrier selection in direct path and subcarrier paring in relaying path. Also, the optimal criterion of selecting these two operating modes is analyzed. A low complexity algorithm is then proposed for allocating radio resources, and the performance is veried by some simulations results. It can be shown that the use of relaying does not always give better performance than only adopting direct path and an appropriate switching mechanism between direct and relaying modes can give much performance improvement.

I. I NTRODUCTION Fixed or mobile Relay Station (RS) are used in Mobile Multi-hop Relay (MMR) systems to extend network coverage and improve system capacity [1], which is known as cooperative diversity [2]. Specically, multi-hop diversity [3] as one type of cooperative diversity can make each destination node have the ability to combine the signals received from all the previous nodes for better signal detection. In literature, two relaying strategies are preferred in practical systems i.e., Amplify-and-Forward (AF) and Decode-and-Forward (DF) [4]. In this paper, only AF relaying technique is used for relaying signals, however the scheme presented could be easily extended to DF case. In the past decade, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) has been demonstrated as an efcient multiple access technique [5]. In a typical OFDMA system, the probability that all users experience deep fading on one specic subcarrier is quite low, implying that a deeply faded subcarrier for one user may be a subcarrier with good channel condition for another user [6]. Thus, OFDMA has an inherent capability of exploiting frequency selectivity enabled multiuser diversity to improve system performance [1]. A multi-hop cellular network with peer-to-peer relaying assumes that each subcarrier can relay information for each other in a duplex manner, which is the basic idea behind OFDMA-based relaying utilizing the benets of both cooperative diversity in relaying systems and multiuser diversity in OFDMA systems. In particular, many schemes have been proposed for OFDMAbased relaying [1][7], which often models this system as an optimization problem with various constraints. In this paper, the system model for relay-aided OFDMA

(1)

U u=1 U u=1 N m=1 nm is ru

N n=1

pn PBS with pn 0, u u

(13) (14)

pm PF R with pm 0, r. ru ru

Fig. 1.

Basic transmission paths in a relay-aided OFDMA system.

where fr = 1 + pn b n u u v0
2

pn pm an u ru r
2

dm ru

2 2

v0 2 + v0 an pn + v0 dm pm r u ru ru

. (2)

This result can be derived from the basic information theory [1][9]. Note that the direct path is considered in relaying mode since it usually exists in cellular systems even though with weak signal strength. This point can be observed from the second term on the left-hand-side of (2), which is also different from most current studies assuming no direct path when relaying path is used [10]. On the other hand, the capacity of merely using the direct path on individual subcarrier is [9] CDP(u) = W log2 fd , where fd = 1 + pn bn /v0 . u u
2 (n)

(3) (4)

In (8)-(14), the subcarrier pair allocation indicator, that is nm = 1 if and only if the subcarrier pair (n, m) ru is allocated to one specic RS-user pair (r, u). Thus, this indicator satises nm {0, 1} for any (r, u, n, m). Since ru it is assumed that each subcarrier cannot be shared, the conditions in (10) and (11) ensure that each subcarrier pair (n, m) can only be associated with one specic RS-user pair (r, u) once. Note that subcarrier pair (n, 0) for RS-user pair (0, u) indicates signal transmission in direct path which nm additionally requires nm = Cru = 0 when r = 0, m = 0 ru or m = 0, r = 0. This condition gives that hop-II may not exist in some virtual subcarrier pairs using direct path only, which is also indicated by the zero sum value in (11). In addition, the power limits of the BS and each RS are given in (12) and (13), respectively. These constraints produce a mixed integer programming problem that is NP-complete [5]. Hence, the explicit solution is difcult to obtain for real-time applications and efcient algorithms are desired. Next, we will discuss the optimal subcarrier selection criteria and propose a low-complexity algorithm for the investigated problem. III. R ESOURCE ALLOCATION The optimal resource allocation for single-hop OFDMA is given in [11]. The optimality is achieved when subcarriers are assigned to users with the best channel gains and power is allocated to subcarriers in a water-lling manner. In addition, the optimal resource allocation principles of two-hop relaying for the investigated system have been given in [8] by using KKT conditions [5] that is to allocate subcarrier pairs to RSuser pairs according to the maximum value in (5). For users, the optimal switching criterion of using direct path only or using relaying path can be summarized as follows > 0, direct path 2 = fd fr = < 0, relaying path (15) = 0, either This criterion can be observed from (1) and (3) and further simplied according to (2) and (4). Based on (15), the maximum value given by
2 nm Cru = (r)fd + [1 (r)] fr

Thus, a unied expression of (1) and (3) can be formulated as follows

nm Cru = (r) CDP(r,u) + [1 (r)] CAF(r,u) , (n,0) (n,m)

(5) (6) (7)

where

CDP(0,u) = CDP(u) , (r) = 1, 0, r=0 . r = 1, ..., R

(n,0)

(n)

In (5), r = 0 is used to represent the BS and can be regarded as a virtual RS, m = 0 is used to simplify the notation accordingly. As a result, r = m = 0 indicates using the direct path. For convenience, we represent RS and user indices as = {0, ..., R} and = {1, ..., U }. When using relaying path, the subcarrier indices in hop-I and in hop-II are denoted as I = {1, ..., N } and II = {0, 1, ..., N }, respectively. Based on (5), the data-rate of user u is ru =
R r=0 N n=1 N m=0 nm nm Cru , ru

(16)

(8)

and the investigated problem for all users is

pn ,pm ,nm u ru ru

max

U u=1

ru

(9) (10) (11) (12)

subject to nm = {0, 1} , r, u, n, m, ru
N n=1 R r=1 N m=0 U u=1 R r=0

will be used in the following algorithm design for the objective of capacity maximization. Note that it has been shown that equal power allocation is near-optimal in high SNR condition [5] and balanced relaying should be considered [1]. Thus, for simplicity1 , we will adopt the efcient equal power allocation as follows pn = PBS /N , u pm = PF R /Nr , ru (17) (18)

nm = {0, 1}, m, m = 0, ru
U u=1

nm = 1, n, ru

1 The power renement presented in [8] will be used in simulation section for a comparison.

where Nr is the maximum number of subcarrier-pairs available for relaying signals through the rth RS. Based on above discussions, the proposed algorithm is given in detail as below. Initialization of Parameters: R Let each Nr be roughly equal with r=1 Nr = N, and U Su be about the same with u=1 Su = N, where Su is the number of subcarriers or subcarrier-pairs for user u. Initialize each value of nm and ru as zero. ru Implementation of Resource Allocation: FOR n = 1...N DO nm (r, u, m) = arg maxr,u,mII Cru ; nm ru = 1; Su = Su 1; Nr = Nr 1 IF r = 0; II II \n IF r = 0; II II \m IF m = 0; \r IF Nr = 0; \u IF Su = 0; END FOR Calculate the data-rate of each user ru by (8).

IV. S IMULATION RESULTS AND CONCLUSION This section presents some simulation results with the following system settings: total bandwidth considered is B = 1MHz; total number of users and RSs are N = 256 and R = 6, respectively; noise power spectrum density is z0 = 108dBm/Hz; total power constraints at BS and each RS are PBS = 50dBm, PF R = 47dBm. In addition, it is assumed that the cell radius is 1.5km with the BS located at the center and six RSs uniformly located at a circle with certain distance to the BS. As used in [5], the large-scale propagation loss factor is assumed to be three while the lognormal shadowing being zero mean with standard deviation of 8dB. Also, the multi-path channel is modeled as six-tap Rayleigh fading with an exponential decaying prole and users experience independent channel statistics. To better investigate direct and relaying paths used for different users, the cell is divided into three regions by equally separating cell-radius, such as in Fig.2. In following simulations, users generated in inner, middle and outer regions follow the probabilities of 0.1, 0.4 and 0.5, respectively. By default, all the simulations are averaged over 100 channel realizations and six RSs are uniformly located at 1/3 cell radius away from the BS. In Fig.3, the achieved system capacity against the number of users is illustrated. The proposed scheme could either use the default equal power (EP) or the rened power (RP) allocation in [8]. Also, the scheme in [12] is given for comparison since it can use a proportional fairness (PF) mechanism to adjust datarate distribution in traditional downlink OFDMA systems. In this gure, the proposed scheme that can dynamically switch between direct path and relaying path is able to signicantly improve system capacity compared with the scheme without relaying. Note that RP does not give much capacity improvement than EP under high SNR, and PF performs worse than optimal (Opt) downlink allocation due to enhanced fairness [5][11]. In addition, all schemes have improved performance with the increased number of users, mainly due to multiuser diversity. The observations in this gure seem trivial since deploying relaying does improve capacity [3], the following two gures will give us an in-depth understanding of the benets of using a dynamic switching mechanism. Fig.4 gives the data-rate distribution of 20 users for one specic user locations shown in Fig.2. Specically, the datarate of each user in Fig.4 is indexed from the nearest user from the BS to the farthest one. It can be observed that when the users are relatively close to the BS, the direct path is more preferable and the considered two schemes achieve similar performance. However, adopting relaying path can greatly improve the achieved data-rates of some users when they are relatively farther away from the BS than the distance from the RS such as the 10th user. As a result, the benet of using relaying path is generally increased with farther geographic location. In Fig.5, the averaged percentage of direct/relaying paths used by all users is plotted for the proposed algorithm. As can be seen, direct and relaying path are both used in this

(imp.1) (imp.2) (imp.3) (imp.4) (imp.5) (imp.6) (imp.7) (imp.8) (imp.9)

Note that in above algorithm description, a b stands for updating the value of a by b, and \k means deleting the element k from the set . In addition, N is assumed to be much larger than R and U , which are N >> U and N >> R. In this proposed algorithm, there exist N iterations with each ones complexity mainly determined by a search operation. As a result, the overall computational complexity of this algorithm has an order of O(U RN 2 ), which is in polynomial time and may be suitable for practical implementations. To be specic, in this proposed algorithm, some necessary parameters are initialized in the rst step with an emphasis on balanced allocation. In the implementation step, within each iteration, the best direct or relaying path is determined (imp.1) according to (16). Then, such an allocation is recorded in the indicator nm (imp.2) with one reduced possible allocation ru for the selected user u (imp.3) and RS r (imp.4). Once direct path is used i.e., r = 0, the corresponding subcarrier cannot be used in other direct or relaying path for interference avoidance (imp.5). Similarly, the used subcarrier in hop-II of relaying path should not be considered again (imp.6). The last processing within FOR loop is to update RS and user index sets once they cannot accept more allocation (imp.7-8). Finally, the data-rate of each user can be calculated (imp.9). Obviously, this algorithm is heuristic since it is only based on the optimal subcarrier-pair switching criterion (15) without accurate power allocation. However, due to the NP feature of the original problem with joint consideration of direct and relaying paths, the explicit power allocation may not be available. Even though many studies have demonstrate the near-optimality of equal power allocation in high SNR condition, possible suboptimal power renement may be used to improve the overall performance a little bit as shown in our previous study [8].

Averaged Percentage of Direct/Relaying Paths

0.8

Direct Path
0.7

Relaying Path

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34

Number of Users

Fig. 2.

Geographic locations of BS, RSs and users.

Fig. 5.

Percentage of Direct/Relaying Paths.

V. C ONCLUSION
5.0 4.5

4.0

3.5

3.0

Proposed Algorithm (RP)

2.5

Proposed Algorithm (EP) Without Relaying (Opt)

2.0

Without Relaying (PF)

In this paper, a system model with channel switching is shown for relay-aided downlink OFDMA resource allocation. This model provides a mechanism to dynamically use direct path or relaying path according to the optimal switching criterion (15). Also, an efcient algorithm is proposed to switch between these two operating paths, which is further veried by some simulation results. Overall, the main contribution is to provide a unied framework to analyze OFDMA-based direct/relaying path selection.
34

System Capacity (bps/Hz)

10

12

14

16

18

20

22

24

26

28

30

32

Number of Users

R EFERENCES
Fig. 3. System capacity versus number of users. [1] G. Li, and H. Liu, Resource allocation for OFDMA relay networks with fairness constraints, IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun., vol. 24, no. 11, pp. 2061-2069, Nov. 2006. [2] G. Kramer, M. Gastpar, and P. Gupta, Cooperative strategies and capacity theorems for relay networks, IEEE Trans. Inform Theory, vol. 51, no. 9, pp. 3037-3063, Sept. 2005. [3] A. K. Sadek, W. Su, et al, Multinode cooperative communications in wireless networks, IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 341-355, Jan. 2007. [4] J. N. Laneman, D. N. C. Tse, and G. W. Wornell, Cooperative diversity in wireless networks: Efcient protocols and outage behavior, IEEE Trans. Information Theory, vol. 50, no. 12, pp. 3062-3080, Dec. 2004. [5] H. Liu, and G. Li, OFDM-Based Broadband Wireless Networks - Design and Optimization. NY: Wiley, Nov. 2005. [6] N. Ruangchaijatupon, and Y. Ji, OFDMA resource allocation based on trafc class-oriented optimization, IEICE Trans. Commun., vol. E92-B, no. 1, pp. 93-101, Jan. 2009. [7] T. C.-Y. Ng, and W. Yu, Joint optimization of relay strategies and resource allocations in cooperative cellular networks, IEEE Trans. Sel. Commun., vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 328-339, Feb. 2007. [8] Bin Da, C. C. Ko, Subcarrier and power allocation in relay-assistant OFDMA cellular system, in Proc. 14th APCC, Japan, Oct. 2008, pp. 15. [9] Thomas M. Cover, and Joy A. Thomas, Elements of Information Theory. Wiley, 1991. [10] Chunhua Sun, and K. Ben Letaief, User cooperation in heterogeneous cognitive radio networks with interference reduction, in Proc. Intl. Conf. on Communications (ICC08), May 2008, pp. 3193-3197. [11] J. Jang, and K. B. Lee, Transmit power adaptation for multiuser OFDM systems, IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun., vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 171-178, Feb. 2003. [12] Z. Shen, J. G. Andrews, and B. L. Evans, Adaptive resource allocation in multiuser OFDM systems with proportional rate constraints, IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 4, pp. 2726-2737, Nov. 2005.

0.6

Without Relaying (Opt) Proposed Algorithm (EP)

Data-rate Distribution (bps/Hz)

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

0.0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

User Index

Fig. 4.

Data-rate distribution for 20 users.

cellular system for better overall capacity. For more number of users, the percentage of using relaying path is gradually increasing, which may be attributed to that more users tend to be assisted by RSs in our setting. Although a different system conguration may produce different results, the importance of deploying exible switching mode between direct and relaying paths in a relay-aided OFDMA celluar system could also be expected, such as that observed in previous results.