A novel type II relay-assisted retransmission scheme for uplink of LTE-advanced system

Relay, which enables coverage extension and throughput enhancement, is a very promising technique for future wireless communication systems. Among different types of relay, type II relay is one kind of inband relays and is hotly discussed in LTE-Advanced system for throughput enhancement. In order to support type II relay, many challenges must be overcome. In this article, we focus on relay-assisted uplink data retransmission and propose a novel joint design of reference signal and data precoding for type II relay. The proposed method not only solves the problem of channel estimation mismatch for control information, but also achieves cooperative diversity gain for data transmission. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method over existing schemes.