On the Value of Context Awareness for Relay Activation in Beyond 5G Radio Access Networks

This paper envisions to augment the Radio Access Network (RAN) infrastructure in Beyond 5G (B5G) systems by exploiting relaying capabilities of user equipment (UE) as a way to improve the coverage, capacity and robustness. Despite the concept and enabling technologies have been in place for some time, their efficient realization requires the conception and development of new features in B5G systems. Among them, this paper focuses on the Relay UE (RUE) activation decision making, in charge of deciding where and when a UE is suitable to be activated to relay traffic from other UEs. Specifically, the paper analyses seven RUE activation strategies that differ on the criteria and the type of context information considered for this decision-making problem. The considered strategies are evaluated through system level simulations in a realistic urban scenario with the objective of assessing the value of each type of context information. Results reveal that the most efficient strategies from the perspective of outage probability reduction are those that account for the number of UEs that would be served by a RUE based on the experienced spectral efficiency.