Random Subchannel Selection of Store-Carry and Forward Transmissions in Traffic Hotspots

Traditional direct transmission or cooperative relaying can hardly meet the traffic demand in the traffic hotspots of the future wireless networks due to the limited radio resources. The store-carry and forward (SCF) scheme can address this issue to some extent, but still suffers from inter-user interference (IUI) of uncoordinated user-to-user (U2U) communications. Existing radio resource allocation approaches can decrease the IUI, but the additional uplink signaling overhead (USO) consumes too much radio resources. To address this issue, we propose a random subchannel selection-based SCF (SCF-RSS) scheme, where a USO-free user selection protocol is designed to establish U2U links. Simulations show that the proposed SCF-RSS can improve the system throughput and energy efficiency compared with the existing SCF.