Capacity Analysis for Multi-hop WiMAX Relay

Wireless relay has been proposed as the solution to extend the coverage of a single base station. In this paper, capacity degradation due to multi-hop relay has been analyzed in a WiMAX relay system. It has been shown that the achievable user access capacity decreases dramatically with the increase of hop number. Moreover, using higher-level modulation or higher turbo-coding rate can significantly enhance the achievable access capacity at each hop. In the end, several recommendations have been presented for the feasible application of a multi-hop WiMAX relay system