Abstract: Centralized scheduling of service flows from a base station to a plurality of stations in a multi-hop mobile relay system is accomplished by a centralized scheduler disposed in the base station. The centralized scheduler schedules the service flows by determining a frequency and a timeslot in which a relay station may re-transmit service flows that the base station sends to the relay station to be retransmitted to a mobile station or in the other direction, from a mobile station to the base station via a relay station. The centralized scheduler also transmits control messages including the frequency and the timeslot in which the relay station may re-transmit the service flows. The relay station receives the service flows in the form of bursts of data packets from the base station or from a mobile station. The relay station having a physical layer that encodes and decodes the data packets up to a media access control level.