UL Performance of Type-1 Relay Enhanced FDD LTE-A Networks with Unaligned Backhaul Subframes

Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) networks are termed as the 4G cellular systems and the standardization has been included in 3GPP Release 10. There are several new techniques used in LTE-A systems to fulfill the target of 4G requirements such as Relay Node (RN), Carrier Aggregation (CA) and so on. Relay has been taken as a promising key technique in the LTE-A network to meet its demanding requirements which could enhance the coverage and increase the data rates in a cost efficient manner. In 3GPP Release 10, Type-1 relay was mainly investigated, which works in half-duplex way and in in-band mode. So the backhaul link and access link operate at the same band, while they are time multiplexed. If there are multiple relays in each cell, the backhaul sub-frames allocated for backhaul link can be the same or different in different relays. In this paper, the uplink performance of the relays with different backhaul sub-frames in FDD LTE-A system is evaluated by the system-level simulator. Some suggestions for the relay deployment are also recommended.