—Relay technology is one of the techniques proposed to enhance the capacity of Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTEA) networks. In an LTE-A relay network, each serving relay node has to store packets for its mobile users and forward the remaining packets to another node during handover. However, increasing the number of forwarded packets will result in the degradation of the users throughput. Flow control and prebuffering schemes are the two main schemes proposed to reduce the number of forwarded packets in LTE-A relay networks. Existing studies assumes the two schemes are independently operated. However, ignoring the effect of buffer overflow at the pre-buffering queue in a flow control scheme may result in ineffective operation. This paper presents a pre-bufferingaware flow control scheme (PFCS) for an LTE-A relay network that jointly considers the effects of both flow control and prebuffering schemes. The proposed PFCS can significantly improve user’s throughput by preventing ...