Patent ID: 8229449

Claim:
A method of allocating subcarrier frequency resources for a relay enhanced cellular communication system including a base station, one or more mobile stations and one or more relay stations, comprising: assigning a set of subcarriers by: allocating subcarriers to one or more access communication links between mobile stations and their serving stations, to meet minimum data rate requirements of the access links; allocating subcarriers to one or more relay communication links between the base station and relay stations to accommodate the data rates achieved on the corresponding access links; balancing subcarrier allocation for access communication links and relay communication links; and detecting over-balanced links and under-balanced links; and reallocating remaining subcarriers from largest over-balanced links to under-balanced links that benefit most from the remaining subcarriers by achieving a highest data rate increase among the under-balanced links; wherein assigning subcarriers further includes: for all remaining over-balanced links, reallocating subcarriers from the remaining over-balanced links to access communication links between the base station and mobile stations in direct communication with the base station for avoiding frequency resource wastage.