METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR BIASING A HANDOFF DECISION BASED ON A BACKHAUL LINK

A decision whether to perform a handover between a relay and a base station may depend, at least in part, on a backhaul link between the relay and the donor base station serving the relay. That is, the relay may provide information relating to a characteristic of the backhaul link to the user equipment, and the user equipment may utilize this information to bias its measurements of signals transmitted from the relay and the base station in accordance with the characteristic of the backhaul link. In this way, if the backhaul link suffers such that it becomes a bottleneck, the handover decision between the relay and the base station is better informed than a decision based solely on the transmissions from the relay and from the base station.