Systems and methodologies are described that facilitate providing a relay protocol to facilitate communicating upper layer protocol data among relay and donor nodes. In particular, a donor node can create a relay protocol packet upon receiving data for a relay node from a core network. Donor node can indicate an assigned relay identifier in the relay protocol packet header to facilitate routing the packet among related downstream relay nodes to arrive at the appropriate relay node, which can process the upper layer protocol data. In addition, a relay node can formulate a relay protocol packet for communication to a donor node through zero or more intermediary upstream relay nodes. Similarly, the relay node can insert the assigned relay identifier in the header to allow the donor node to associate response or related packets from the core network with the relay node.
