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Network planning tools are routinely used by operators to improve the system performance and to provide a satisfactory service with minimal deployment expenditure. In this context, the deployment flexibility of relay nodes, which mainly stems from the wireless backhaul link, compact physical characteristics, and low power consumption, can be exploited to enhance the system performance. In this paper, we model and analyze two simple approaches that can be used for the planning of two-hop cellular relay networks. The aim of the so-called relay location selection and serving cell selection approaches is to enhance system performance by improving the quality of the wireless relay backhaul link. Location selection takes into account the shadowing properties at the different possible relay node deployment locations, considering only the link quality toward the serving base station. On the other hand, cell selection …