Simulation Study on 2 Hop-Proportional Fair Scheduling and eICIC in Relay Type 1 Extended LTE-A Networks

3GPP´s LTE-Advanced has defined type 1 inband relay nodes (RNs) which support a time-division based transmit and reception scheme. RNs´ backhaul and access links use the same resources as the macro base station Access links.This paper provides a detailed analysis of the problem of the increased dynamic of interference in the system. It provides 3GPP compliant system level simulation (SLS) results for 1, 2 and 4 RNs per macro cell with an adapted 2-hop proportional fair Scheduler for no, 20 and 40% muting of the time transmission intervals (TTIs) at the macro basestation (MBS). Finally, it compares the results in terms of SINR, user throughput and system BLER and references the results to a MBS network without RNs. The results show that the performance of the network is very sensitive when trying to combine inband RNs with muting MBSs. MBS muting does not outperform the results with no MBS muting. However, the results motivate further investigations on inband RNs with enhanced inter cell interference coordination (eICIC), especially in terms of LA improvements.