Performance of relay enhanced LTE-Advanced networks for selected suburban scenarios in emerging market environments

The emerging Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTEA) standard promises improvements in throughput, latency, spectrum-flexibility and costs-per-bit, as well as, coverage extensions through the use of relay nodes. These features combine to make LTE mobile networks an attractive long-term solution for providing much-needed affordable broadband access in the emerging markets (e.g., Africa). The fast expanding informal suburban settlements of those countries represents one of the key areas that could benefit from this new technology. This paper presents a comparative simulation study for various suburban macro-only and macro-relay deployment scenarios. The results demonstrate that use of relays enables significant coverage improvements in downlink, reducing costly need for dense LTE-Advanced macro site deployments in those suburban areas and contributing to affordability of broadband access.