Spatial Analysis of Opportunistic Downlink Relaying in a Two-Hop Cellular System

We consider a two-hop cellular system in which the mobile nodes help the base station by relaying information to the dead spots. While two-hop cellular schemes have been analyzed previously, the distribution of the node locations has not been explicitly taken into account. In this paper, we model the base station locations deterministically and the mobile stations by a point process on the plane. The node with the best channel to the destination that received information in the first hop acts as a relay to the destination (selection cooperation), and we obtain the success probability of this two-hop scheme, accounting for the interference from all other cells. We use tools from stochastic geometry and point process theory to analyze this two-hop opportunistic relaying scheme. Besides the results obtained, a main contribution of the paper is to introduce a mathematical framework that can be used to analyze arbitrary relaying schemes.