On PHY and MAC Performance of 3G-LTE in a Multi-Hop Cellular Environment

Next generation cellular radio systems will exceed the limitations of UMTS. The convergence of data and voice traffic will be supported by a flexible OFDM-based PHY layer and an OFDMA-capable MAC layer. The long term evolution (LTE) successor of the 3G systems incorporates this. But problems concerning coverage and capacity at the cell border still remain for the classical cellular layout. Relaying or Multihop operation is an option to massively improve the coverage as well as the capacity issue at low cost, without the need of a cable or fibre access. For the performance analysis of such cellular systems models for ISO-OSI layers 1+2 (PHY+MAC) are needed. In this paper an analytic modelling framework and results are presented for the cellular LTE performance in two multihop scenarios.