  This paper considers a relay-assisted bidirectional cellular network where
the base station (BS) communicates with each mobile station (MS) using OFDMA
for both uplink and downlink. The goal is to improve the overall system
performance by exploring the full potential of the network in various
dimensions including user, subcarrier, relay, and bidirectional traffic. In
this work, we first introduce a novel three-time-slot time-division duplexing
(TDD) transmission protocol. This protocol unifies direct transmission, one-way
relaying and network-coded two-way relaying between the BS and each MS. Using
the proposed three-time-slot TDD protocol, we then propose an optimization
framework for resource allocation to achieve the following gains: cooperative
diversity (via relay selection), network coding gain (via bidirectional
transmission mode selection), and multiuser diversity (via subcarrier
assignment). We formulate the problem as a combinatorial optimization problem,
which is NP-complete. To make it more tractable, we adopt a graph-based
approach. We first establish the equivalence between the original problem and a
maximum weighted clique problem in graph theory. A metaheuristic algorithm
based on any colony optimization (ACO) is then employed to find the solution in
polynomial time. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol
together with the ACO algorithm significantly enhances the system total
throughput.
