Evaluation of Relay-Enhanced LTE-Advanced Networks

Abstract

The Third Generation Partnership Program's Long-Term Evolution Advanced (3GPP LTE-Advanced) group is developing a new standard for mobile broadband access that will meet the throughput and coverage requirements of a fourth generation cellular technology. The key goals for this evolution are increased data rate, improved spectrum efficiency, improved coverage and reduced latency. The ultimate results of these goals are significantly improving service provisioning and reduction of operator costs for different traffic scenarios. One of the main challenges faced by the developing standard is providing high throughput at the cell edge. Cell edge performance is becoming more important as cellular systems employ higher bandwidths with the same amount of transmit power and use higher carrier frequencies with infrastructure designed for lower carrier frequencies. One solution to improve coverage is to use the fixed relays to transmit data between the Base Stations and the Mobile Stations or User Equipments through multi hop communication. For this reason, relay technologies have been actively studied and considered in the standardization process of next-generation mobile broadband communication system. As a next-generation 3GPP standard, LTE-Advanced exclusively takes the relay technology into account. This thesis focuses the relay technologies for the LTE-Advanced systems and evaluates the performance of the relay-enhanced LTE-Advanced network. The approach for this work is to design several environments for LTE-Advanced networks involving relays. Incorporating the channel model from the Wireless World Initiative New Radio (WINNER) project, four environments were designed among which one environment considers no relay at all and the rest of the environments considered relay deployments. And the performances of all the environments are evaluated in terms of Symbol Error Rate (SER) versus the Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), under several different scenarios defined in WINNER project. As an outcome, the simulation results from the simulator show that relay technologies can effectively improve service performance.