The invention discloses a cellular downlink throughput optimization method based on an out of band D2D multi-hop relay. The method comprises the following steps: a base station determines the mode of each UE obtaining a cellular channel to receive data from the base station in three phases: preselecting a first relay, preselecting a second relay and verifying the link throughput of the preselected relays, wherein the mode comprises directly receiving data from the base station, receiving the data by selecting a relay to transfer the data and receiving the data by selecting two relays to transfer the data; in the phase of preselecting the first relay, the first relay is selected by comprehensively considering the improvement of the throughput and the residual energy level of the relay; in the phase of preselecting the second relay, the second relay is selected by setting an energy constraint threshold to ensure that the residual energy level of the second relay is not less than a corresponding value of the first relay; and in the phase of verifying the link throughput of the preselected relays, whether the preselected relay is abandoned or retained is determined according to whether the throughput is improved. By adoption of the cellular downlink throughput optimization method disclosed by the invention, the data receiving quality can be effectively improved, the throughput is effectively improved, the service life of the network is prolonged, and the computation and communication costs are reduced.