Effect of ISD on pathloss and SINR in 4G systems

Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems face the problem of coverage at the cell edge user equipments (UEs). A prominent technology of LTE-Advanced systems known as relaying provides solution to this problem. Relaying not only offers significant gain for the system capacity but also improves the coverage of the cell edge UEs. This paper investigates the performance of the LTE system in terms of the path loss and signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) parameters in two different scenarios - rural and urban environment. Simulations results show the effect of inter site distance (ISD) on these parameters. It can be seen that macro fading and shadow fading result into an additional 20 dB path loss in case of urban scenario as compared to a rural scenario. The importance of deploying relay nodes (RNs), for extending the coverage, reducing the path loss and thereby improving the SINR at cell edges, has been focused upon.