System-Level Evaluation of Opportunistic Client Cooperation in Wireless Cellular Networks

Growing demand for bandwidth dictates the use of smaller wireless cells, which results in increased inter-cell interference. In most contemporary cellular systems, the clients at the cell edge typically use higher transmission power to compensate for increasing path loss and fading and thus generate the most interference. Client relay is believed to be a promising technique to enhance the performance of cell-edge users by allowing them to exploit other users as relay nodes and thus transmit with less power. In this paper, authors conduct in-depth system-level evaluation of client relay technique in state-of-the-art wireless cellular networks. Several important scenarios are considered, including opportunistic client relay behavior and various channel models. It is demonstrated that client cooperation may considerably improve system performance in terms of cell-edge spectral efficiency for the cost of some increase in cell-center energy consumption.