Methods and apparatuses are provided that include scheduling best effort (BE) traffic for devices communicating with a relay. A donor evolved Node B (eNB) schedules BE traffic for various devices based on a historical throughput. The donor eNB can determine a number of devices served by the relay for discounting the historical throughput, and accordingly assigning resources based on the number of devices instead of the single relay. In this regard, the donor eNB can maintain proportional fairness of the BE scheduling. Alternatively, the relay can request a guaranteed bit rate (GBR) bearer to handle the BE traffic, where the requested data rate of the GBR bearer allows for communicating the BE traffic for the number of devices. Resource allocation for BE traffic can also be bound by a maximum throughput at the relay and/or one or more access link data rates.