On the Coverage Extension and Capacity Enhancement of Inband Relay Deployments in LTE-Advanced Networks

Decode-and-forward relaying is a promising enhancement to existing radio access networks and is currently being standardized in 3GPP to be part of the LTE-Advanced release 10. Two inband operation modes of relay nodes are to be supported, namely Type 1 and Type 1b. Relay nodes promise to offer considerable gain for system capacity or coverage depending on the deployment prioritization. However, the performance of relays, as any other radio access point, significantly depends on the propagation characteristics of the deployment environment. Hence, in this paper, we investigate the performance of Type 1 and Type 1b inband relaying within the LTE-Advanced framework in different propagation scenarios in terms of both coverage extension capabilities and capacity enhancements. A comparison between Type 1 and Type 1b relay nodes is as well presented to study the effect of the relaying overhead on the system performance in inband relay node deployments. System level simulations show that Type 1 and Type 1b inband relay deployments offer low to very high gains depending on the deployment environment. As well, it is shown that the effect of the relaying overhead is minimal on coverage extension whereas it is more evident on system throughput.