System Level Performance Evaluation of LTE with MIMO and Relays in Reuse-1 IMT-Advanced Scenarios

Cellular radio systems of the next generation will have to comply with the IMT-Advanced guidelines. Advanced radio techniques must be integrated into wireless systems to achieve the high spectral efficiency numbers required. Multiple antenna techniques such as MIMO are beneficial in regions of high SINR and low spatial stream correlation. Multihop techniques with fixed relays increase the throughput in regions close to the cell edge where SINR is typically low. Another challenge is the reuse-1 paradigm which worsens the interference situation. In this paper a mathematical model on system level is proposed and applied which allows to calculate system performance measures such as spectral efficiency. The MIMO model allows fast system evaluation without a lot of parameters and is therefore suitable for MAC layer simulative evaluation. The paper compares performance results for these techniques.