Patent ID: 8594561

Claim:
A cellular wide-area radio communications system, comprising: a plurality of base stations; a plurality of fixed relay stations; and a plurality of mobile stations; each of said relay stations associated with at least one of said base stations, each of said mobile stations associated at least with one of said base stations or one of said relay stations, wireless data transmissions between mobile stations and base stations taking place either as single-hop data transmissions between said mobile stations and their associated base stations, or as multi-hop data transmissions that comprise a data transmission between said mobile stations and their associated relay stations and a data transmission between said relay stations and base stations associated with said relay stations, said data transmission between said relay stations and base stations associated with said relay stations of said multi-hop data transmissions experiencing an additional antenna gain as compared to said single-hop data-transmissions, and an average number of multi-hop data transmissions in said radio communications system being equal to or larger than an average number of single-hop data transmissions so that, on average, at least as many multi-hop data-transmissions as single-hop data transmissions take place.