An Effective Relay Coordination Scheme Based on Opportunistic Relaying for LTE-Advanced

This paper aims at designing a new effective signaling mechanism for relay coordination in LTE-Advanced. Under the new signaling mechanism, the need of synchronization among multiple relays is eliminated, thus it owns advantages of practicality and high spectral efficiency. Also, considering the characteristic of access and backhaul link in LTE-A, the outage capacity and bit error rate for ODAF and NDAF opportunistic relaying schemes are compared to prove the effectiveness of the scheme in LTE-A. The results showed that NDAF protocols have better performance than ODAF protocols. It was showed that for a target outage capacity performance, only two quantization bits are needed while for a target bit error rate requirement, at most four quantization bits are needed. Also, there is a tradeoff between quantization bits and number of candidate relays.