In this paper, a mobile relay station (MRS) for vehicles with a beamforming antenna is considered to increase the reliability of the transmission link, particularly for the MRS at the cell boundary. A cell searching and direction-of-arrival estimation method for an MRS with a uniform linear array is proposed for OFDM-based cellular systems in a multipath environment, even with the existence of the symbol timing offsets and carrier frequency offsets. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by computer simulation using the standard profile of IEEE 802.16e.