On the Downlink Time, Frequency and Power Coordination in an LTE Relay Network

Heterogeneous cellular networks have emerged as a new paradigm in the wireless network to increase cellular capacity and coverage. Future heterogeneous networks will have a mixed deployment of high power and low power nodes. This creates complicated interference scenarios that require more tight resource coordination among neighbouring nodes than in the traditional cellular networks. In this paper we consider a heterogeneous LTE relay network and investigate two downlink resource coordination schemes in the time/frequency/power domains in such a network. We perform detailed simulation study on the two proposed schemes, and compare them with a third scheme that does not have frequency or power coordination. Our study shows that by allowing tight time/frequency/power coordination, the system can achieve much higher system capacity and better received downlink signal quality.