Performance analysis of maximum SNR scheduling with an infrastructure relay link

Abstract

We consider infrastructure-based amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying for extending downlink and uplink coverage areas of a cellular base station. The base station serves multiple mobile users via a multi-hop backhaul relay link by sharing out access link channel resources with maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scheduling. We analyze the performance of the system by deriving closed-form expressions for outage probability, outage capacity, ergodic capacity, average end-to-end SNR and amount of fading (AoF). These measures show that maximum SNR scheduling of multiple users in a cellular relay link offers significant diversity, capacity and SNR improvement over single-user transmission and round robin scheduling. We also relate performance of the relay link to that of a distributed antenna system (DAS), and show that the noisy wireless backhaul relay link induces tolerable performance deterioration compared to deploying a cable-connected distributed antenna. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.