TDMA Achieves the Optimal Diversity Gain in Relay-Assisted Cellular Networks

In multi-access wireless networks, transmission scheduling is a key component that determines the efficiency and fairness of wireless spectrum allocation. At one extreme, greedy opportunistic scheduling that allocates airtime to the user with the largest instantaneous channel gain achieves the optimal spectrum efficiency and transmission reliability but the poorest user-level fairness. At the other extreme, fixed TDMA scheduling achieves the fairest airtime allocation but the lowest spectrum efficiency and transmission reliability. To balance the two competing objectives, extensive research efforts have been spent on designing opportunistic scheduling schemes that reach certain tradeoff points between the two extremes. In this paper and in contrast to the conventional wisdom, we find that in relay-assisted cellular networks, fixed TDMA achieves the same optimal diversity gain as greedy opportunistic scheduling. In addition, by incorporating very limited opportunism, a simple relaxed-TDMA scheme asymptotically achieves the same optimal system reliability in terms of outage probability as greedy opportunistic scheduling. This reveals a surprising fact: transmission reliability and user fairness are no longer contradicting each other in relay-assisted systems. They can be both achieved by the simple TDMA schemes. For practical implementations, we further propose a fully distributed algorithm to implement the relaxed-TDMA scheme. Our results here may find applications in the design of next-generation wireless communication systems with relay architectures such as LTE-advanced and WiMAX.