Apparatus and method selecting a base station in a network

An apparatus, such as a user equipment relay (UER), selects a preferred base station based on the backhaul characteristics of the available base stations. These characteristics may be average uptime, hop count, bandwidth or throughput. An initial base station may be selected based on the signal quality between the UER and the available base stations, such as the RSRP values. The UER may obtain identifiers for each of the available base stations and transmit these on a request for the backhaul data. The received data may be a mask value which is applied to the base station identifiers to determine which base stations may be used, and this mask may be used to differentiate macro and femto base stations. The UER may also send GPS data on the request, and then receive GPS data indicating an improved position for its deployment.