Performance Comparison of Relaying and User Cooperation in Multi-Cell Scenarios

This work focuses on the signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) comparison of a relaying and a user cooperation strategy. For the relaying strategy we consider operator placed relays in each cell and power control is utilized in the source nodes to achieve a target SINR. For the cooperative strategy, user cooperation with coherent combining is utilized in order to meet a given target SINR at the receiver. Both cases are analyzed in a multi-cell scenario with a soft frequency reuse factor of 3. With 16QAM modulation and no cooperation only 80% of the users achieve the target SINR. We can show that with user cooperation 82% of all users achieve the target SINR and with relaying 98%.