Cooperative communications for LTE-advanced-relay and CoMP

Abstract

The Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) system is currently under development to allow for significantly higher spectral efficiency and data throughput than the LTE systems. In a wireless system based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with frequency reuse factor one, the achievable cell spectral efficiency is often limited by the inter-cell interference or coverage shortage of base stations. In LTE-A, coordinated multi-point transmission/reception (a.k.a. multi-cellMIMO or base station cooperation) and relaying technologies are being introduced to clear these major performance hurdles. In this paper, cooperative communication technologies being discussed in LTE-A systems are presented, together with considerations on system design.