Joint Shared Relaying and Base Station Coordination in LTE-Advanced Networks

—In order to achieve high spectral efficiency with improved peak data rates of cell-edge uses and enable an enhanced network coverage with good throughput both in downlink and uplink, LTE-Advanced proposes separately base station coordination and relaying techniques. In the purpose to increase the cell-edge user data rates beyond what can be reached by using either one of the techniques alone, this paper introduces a novel transmission scheme, which combines relaying and base station coordination together. Numerical results show that the transmission scheme is a good solution for improving the cell-edge multi-user performance. The cooperative transmission scheme can enable the simultaneous transmissions to multiple users in different cells and gain higher sum-rate capacity than those systems applying relaying or base station coordination alone. Key-Words: —LTE-Advanced; Relaying; Base station coordination; Throughput; SNR; Inter-cell interference.