320

km

km

sources relays sources

Fig. 3. Two-dimensional plane of nodes location.

3.5
Proposed

Fixed subcarrier pairing
3

2.5

2

1.5

1

0.5

0

5 0 5 10 15

source power per subcarrier (dB)

Fig. 4. Performance comparison of the proposed algorithm and the
benchmark.

log-normal shadowing is set to 5.8 dB. The small-scale fading
is modeled by multi-path Rayleigh fading process, where the
power delay profile is exponentially decaying with maximum
delay spread of 5 and maximum Doppler spread of 5
Hz. A total of 2000 independent channel realizations were
generated, each associated with a different node locations. The
number of subcarriers is = 32. All sources have the same
maximum power constraints, so do all relays and they satisfy
= 1 +3dB= 2 +3dB(per-subcarrier)forall and
.

As a performance benchmark, the fixed subcarrier pairing
scheme is considered. Like the previous work (e.g., [1], [2]),
we let signals transmitted by the user pair on one subcarrier
in the MAC phase is forwarded on the same subcarrier by a
relay in the BC phase, i.e., ( ) = , rather than seeking
the optimal subcarrier pairing. Then the problem reduces to
selecting the optimal user pair and relay for each subcar-
rier for throughput maximization, which can be optimally
solved by the greedy algorithm. Namely, each subcarrier
shall be assigned to the user pair and the relay that satisfy
( , ) = arg max , , The overall complexity

, .

of the fixed subcarrier paring scheme is ( ). Recall
that the complexity of the proposed graph-based scheme
is ( 2 + 3), which is higher than the benchmark
scheme.

Fig. 4 illustrates the total throughput when there are = 5
user pairs and = 4 relays in the network. We observe
that the proposed optimal channel and relay assignment with
adaptive subcarrier pairing achieves 8 10% improvement in

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 60, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2012

2.2

Proposed

Fixed subcarrier pairing

2.1

2

1.9

1.8

1.7

1.6

0 5 10 15 20

number of relays

Fig. 5. Effects of the number of relays, where = 32, = 5, and
1 = 10 dB.

total throughput over the scheme with fixed subcarrier pairing.
Fig. 5 shows the throughput performance versus the number
of relays when = 5 and 1 = 10 dB. It is observed
that having multiple relays in the system can provide relay
selection diversity. However, the gain brought by increasing
the number of relays is diminishing when is large enough.
This is due to the fact that the capacity scaling of relay
selection is1 2 loglog [14].

V. CONCLUSIONS

In this work, we investigated the joint optimization of
subcarrier-pairing based subcarrier assignment and relay selec-
tion for multi-relay multi-pair two-way relay OFDM networks.
The problem was formulated as a combinatorial optimization
problem and NP-complete. We proposed a bipartite match-
ing approach to solve the problem optimally in polynomial
time. The work assumed the amplify-and-forward based non-
regenerative relay strategy. The similar problem based on
more advanced regenerative two-way relay strategies can be
considered in the future work.

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