An Opportunistic Subchannel Allocation Scheme in Relay-based Marine Communication Networks

Abstract

This paper proposes an opportunistic subchannel allocation (OSA) scheme for relay-based marine communication networks to improve a sum-rate capacity. In most previous works for relay-based networks, each RS delivers the data received from the BS immediately to the corresponding ships in each frame. The achievable data-rate of the two-hop transmission (BS-RS and RS-ship links) is thus limited by the channel quality between BS-RS and RS-ship links. Hence, the radio resources can be wasted according to the difference in the channel quality between the BS-RS link and the RS-ship link. The proposed OSA scheme reduces the waste of radio resources by efficiently and independently allocating the radio resources at the BS-RS link and at the RS-ship link according to the channel quality of each link. The proposed OSA scheme, however, increases the computational complexity, because the BS finds the optimal OFDMA resource by checking the channel quality of all BS-RS links and RS-ship links. The simulation results show that the sum-rate capacity of the proposed OSA scheme improves maximum 14.0% compared with the conventional scheme.