A scheduling technique for wireless multihop relay communication systems is provided. With spatial separation caused by the shadowing effect of surrounding buildings, a base station and its relay stations in a single cell are divided into several groups by following the rule that stations with severe potential interference are separated into different groups. The base station arranges the scheduling of these groups and serves these groups sequentially in the time domain. To take advantage of shadow effect, the same radio resources can be scheduled for relay stations within the same group due to the isolation of interfering signals. In the present invention, base stations and relay stations are equipped with directional antennas or sector antennas to further exploit the advantage of spatial separations. Different relay groups can also reuse the radio resource through appropriate power control. The cell capacity can be enhanced substantially because of aggressive radio resource reuse.