Evaluations of Achievable Rate and Power Consumption in Cooperative Cellular Networks With Two Classes of Nodes

Previous work on cooperative cellular networks has mostly considered homogeneous relaying architectures where all nodes act as both sources and relays. In this paper, we examine the performance of heterogeneous cooperative cellular networks with the following two classes of nodes: source nodes (SNs) that do not act as relays and relaying agents that are dedicated to relaying functions with little concern about power consumption. In this architecture, SNs are able to reap the benefits of cooperative communications, such as improvements in the achievable data rate and reductions in the transmit power, while reducing the overall power consumption since they do not act as a relay. With an SN employing no more than two parallel relaying agents between itself and the base station, the proposed architecture achieves a 10%-80% improvement in the average achievable rate and a 15%-30% savings in the average amount of consumed power as compared to the situation where an SN can use, at most, a single relay agent.