A practical perspective on cooperative relaying in cellular systems

Relays are used to forward data from the source to the destination. There are scenarios wherein a relay is the only means for the data to reach the destination. In this paper, we will focus on scenarios wherein one or more relays are used to forward data to the destinations when the destination is already in the coverage area of the source. This latter scenario has been studied under the term cooperative relaying, as a scheme that primarily aids in improving the throughput within a given coverage area. Our goal is to take previously postulated studies and evaluate achievable cooperative relaying gains in more realistic settings. In discussing the gains, we first identify the practical constraints and study the implications of adding such constraints on the gains that can be extracted from cooperative relaying.