Amplify-and-forward cooperation under interference-limited spatial reuse of the relay slot

Cooperative transmission has emerged as an effective tool to deal with channel impairments. In this work we study the applicability of amplify-and-forward cooperative transmission in the downlink of a TDMA cellular system where idle terminals act as relays. The base station may have a multiple antenna configuration, whereas all terminals are equipped with a single antenna. Although cooperation can be viewed as a virtual MIMO system, it further allows dealing with shadowing and pathloss. In order to improve the spectral efficiency loss incurred by the half-duplex relays, in this work we consider the reuse of the relay time slot by simultaneous transmissions from the active relays in the cell. We are able to model the interfering power received by each destination in that slot. The only system parameters adjusted to control the interference are the number of interfering relay terminals and a cell-wide .target SNR in the relay-destination link. This way, it is shown that cooperative transmission is able to provide significant gains in terms of throughput over the direct transmission under round-robin packet scheduling and uniform distribution of terminals by controlling the rate of each transmission (rate control).