Enhancing link quality in a multi-hop relay in LTE-A employing directional antenna

This paper proposes a new approach for enhancing link quality between relay node (RN) and base station (BS). Two types of antennas were proposed at the relay, the first type is the directional antenna, which is directed toward the base station to improve the relay link quality, thereby reducing outage probability by increasing relay link capacity. The second type is the omni-directional antenna, which is used for the exchange of information between the RN and attached users. An improvement of 32% in capacity and 25% in received signal strength at the relay link has been observed. An ATDI simulator, which handles the digital cartography for the first tier of interference in urban areas, verified the numerical results.