Uplink system capacity of a cellular network with cooperative mobile relay

This paper studies the performance of a hybrid cellular network with cellular controlled direct radio links between multiple mobile User Equipments (UEs). The main focus is on the uplink of the proposed system with multiple idle UEs acting as relays to assist the communication of any given UE with an active connection. In the presence of multiple UEs as relays, the Base Station (BS) dynamically chooses the best relay to maximize the throughput of each radio link. We present system capacity results using Monte Carlo system simulation techniques. Further, we compare results with and without the use of distributed beam forming techniques. Our results indicate that cell edge capacity could be improved by more than 99% by using idle UEs in the system as mobile relays. The performance improvement at cell edge is achieved while improving the mean cell throughput by more than 50%.