Relay Architectures

for 3GPP LTE Advanced

What are the relays?
One solution to improve coverage is the use of fixed
relays, pieces of infrastructure without a wired
backhaul connection, that relay messages between the
base station (BS) and mobile stations (MSs) through
multihop communication .
Why relaying ? The main challenge

 considering relaying for cost- is overcoming the extra

effective throughput interference added by the
enhancement and coverage presence of relays.
extension. providing high throughput at
the cell edge.
Relay transmission techniques
Analog repeater :The simplest strategy, which uses
a combination of directional antennas and a power
amplifier to repeat the transmit signal .
Amplify-and-forward :relays apply linear
transformation to the received signal .
decode-and-forward :relays decode the signal
then re-encode for transmission
compress-and-forward
Relaying Strategies
One-way relays
Two-way relays
Shared relays
 One-way relays
The one-way model consists of one single-antenna relay per
sector serving only users in its sector. It performs a decode-
and-forward operation.
enhances capacity near the cell edge but is very limited by
interference.
 (1st phase )
B.S’s transmit Relay receive & decode
(2nd phase )
M.S receive &
Relay re-encode & transmit decode
Two-way relays
The two-way model consists of a single amplify-and-
forward relay per sector and allows simultaneous
uplink/downlink communication.
avoiding the half-duplex loss of one-way relays
because both the base station and mobile station
transmit to the relay at the same time in the first time
slot. Then, in the second time slot, the relay
rebroadcasts what it received to the base station and
mobile station.
1st time slot 2nd time slot
B.S transmit
Relay transmit in
&
uplink & downlink
M.S transmit
Improving Two-Way Relaying
Two-way relaying aims to increase the sum uplink plus
downlink rates , to truly maximize the uplink plus
downlink rate, one will simply allow the downlink to occur
all the time.
Problem !! allowing adjacent base stations and mobile
stations to transmit simultaneously is an inherently bad
idea unless the receiver is located very close to the mobile.
Solution : use an antenna array at the relay to steer nulls
toward the nearest base stations.
Problem !! If a mobile being in the same direction as the
base station and being in the same null.
So Two-way relay works well when the relay is close to the
handset.
Shared relays
A shared relay is a relay that is the subordinate of multiple
base stations (the base stations share the relay).
The idea is to place a multiple antenna relay at the intersection
of two or more cells. The relay decodes the signals from the
intersecting base stations using the multiple receive antennas
to cancel interference and retransmits to multiple users
using MIMO broadcast methods.
Able to remove much of the dominant interference, which
gives the highest rates of the strategies.

Relay receive Sk Decode Re-encode to Xk at highest rate.

Advantages of shared relay:
1) simpler alternative to base station coordination.
2) removing local interference.
3) outperforms one-way relay by over 80% in downlink.
4) make handoff easier, How !!!
consider a mobile station moving away from a base station and
toward a shared relay. As it enters the relay's zone of service, it is now
served by this relay but still associated with its original base station.
As it continues past the relay and into the next cell, it is still served
by the shared relay, which may signal to the original base station that
it is time to handoff the mobile to the adjacent BS. So long as the
handoff procedure is done before the mobile leaves the shared relay's
zone of service, the mobile will stay connected to the network.
Disadvantages of shared relay:
The shared relay is moderately complex.
Comparison between Relaying Strategies
In the one-way and shared relay cases, communication takes
place in two orthogonal phases. In the first phase, the base station
transmits while the relay receives, and in the second phase the
relay transmits while the mobile receives. There will be a capacity
penalty due to the use of two phases to transmit the same
information.. In the two-way case, the base station and mobile
stations both transmit in the first phase, while the relay transmits
in the second phase.
decode-and-forward for the shared and one-way relays, amplify-
and-forward for the two-way relay.
The main differences between the one-way relay and the shared
relay are :
 1) The number of antennas per relay .
 2) The relay transmit power .
 3) The number of relays per sector.
 Simulations

System model under consideration for the simulations presented in this paper. The focus is
on the triangular area in the center of the network. This figure also shows the frequency
reuse pattern for the shared relay and base station coordination under reuse factor 6.
Downlink sum rates for each of the strategies presented in this paper as a function of the
relay transmit power. The solid lines represent reuse factor 1, while the dotted lines
represent reuse factor 6.
Downlink sum rate in one sector versus mobile station position for base station
coordination, shared relaying, and direct transmission. A reuse factor 6 is shown because
the curves are more separated in this case. By adapting between shared relaying and direct
transmission depending on user location, the rates of base station coordination can be
approached.
Future work
Focus on more detailed design of shared relays.
Two-way relaying requires research for interference
mitigation in the uplink.
Combining base station coordination and relaying.