On the performance of time division multiple access-based multihop fixed cellular networks with respect to available frequency carriers

In multihop cellular networks (MCN), the user nodes can act as relays and forward other nodes' traffic to/from base stations. There are several advantages of MCN such as the improved signal quality and higher coverage. However, it is known that multihop relaying networks require extra radio resources. Therefore the performance of MCN depends to a great extent on the availability of adequate radio resources. The performance of a time division multiple access (TDMA)-based multihop fixed cellular network is analysed with highlighting the dependence of the system performance on the amount of available radio resources, namely, the number of frequency carriers. Results show that in a fixed cellular network, the multihop architecture significantly outperforms the traditional single-hop architecture in terms of the outage probability and throughput if an adequate amount of frequency carriers is available in the network. Otherwise, the multihop fixed cellular networks architecture loses its superiority and might even lead to performance degradation, particularly at high loading levels.