Transmit Power Minimization and Base Station Planning for High-Speed Trains with Multiple Moving Relays in OFDMA Systems

High-speed railway system equipped with moving relay stations placed on the middle of the ceiling of each train wagon is investigated. The users inside the train are served in two hops via the orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) technology. In this work, we first focus on minimizing the total downlink power consumption of the base station (BS) and the moving relays while respecting specific quality of service (QoS) constraints. We first derive the optimal resource allocation solution in terms of OFDMA subcarriers and power allocation using the dual decomposition method. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm based on the Hungarian method in order to find a suboptimal but low complexity solution. Moreover, we propose an OFDMA planning solution for high-speed train by finding the maximal inter-BS distance given the required user data rates in order to perform seamless handover. Our simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed resource allocation schemes in the case of the 3GPP Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) and compare them with previously developed algorithms as well as with the direct transmission scenario. Our results also highlight the significant planning gain obtained thanks to the use of multiple relays instead of the conventional single relay scenario.