Cooperative Feeder Links for Relay Enhanced Networks

Abstract:
Heterogeneous networks are gaining more and more interest as one means to cope with the expected data rise in future mobile networks. The upgrade of cellular macro networks by placing relay nodes, as one option, has the benefit of avoiding any wired backhaul network, but has to be paid by lower performance compared to pico stations. In the ARTIST4G project we analyze options to get close to the performance of pico stations by using highly effective inband relaying. The goal is to maximize the performance of the donor eNB (DeNB) to RN links - i.e. of the feeder links - by a specifically adapted joint precoding coordinated multi-point (JP-CoMP) scheme to which we refer to as cooperative relaying (CoR). In this paper, the expected performance gains under ideal conditions will be assessed based on system level simulations and different measurements. A further focus is on the main enablers of any CoMP scheme, i.e. channel estimation and feedback techniques properly adapted taking the specific conditions of relay enhanced networks into account.