UL Performance Evaluation of Relay Enhanced FDD LTE-Advanced Networks

Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) has been recently agreed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) as the next evolution of LTE. Relay, which could enhance the coverage and increase the data rates in a cost efficient manner, has been taken as a promising key technique in the LTE-A network to meet its demanding requirement. In 3GPP Release 10, Type-1 relay was agreed as a work item (WI) recently. According to 3GPP´s definition, Type- 1 relay works in half-duplex way and in in-band mode. So the backhaul link and access link work in the same band, but they are time multiplexed. If there are multiple relays in each cell, the backhaul sub-frames allocated for backhaul link can be the same or different in different relays. In this paper, the uplink performance evaluation of the relays with different backhaul sub-frames in FDD LTE-A networks is carried out by doing the system- level simulation according to the 3GPP´s specifications. Some suggestions for the relay deployment are also recommended.