Business Impact of Relay Deployment for Coverage Extension in 3GPP LTE-Advanced

Relays are expected to be a cost efficient way to fulfill requirements on high data rate coverage in next generation cellular networks, like LTE-Advanced. This paper presents a cost model and the respective analysis used for investigating the impact of relaying on cost savings for operators. The approach consists of defining the service level that next generation cellular networks should provide and deriving deployments of eNBs and RNs (or equivalently iso- performance scenarios) that fulfill these requirements. Iso- performance scenarios are therefore obtained by means of simulations and compared in the cost model.