Capacity and Coverage Analysis of a 3GPP-LTE Multihop Deployment Scenario

Broadband wireless access will be deployed in a cellular way with 3GPP-LTE [1]. For the first rollout the main demand is a huge area coverage. With only few available base station sites that are connected to an access fiber, multihop (relaying) techniques can be used well to fill the coverage gaps. Later with increasing offered traffic, the demand shifts to higher capacity over the area. Even for this purpose relays are beneficial. There is an area around relays where they provide better overall capacity to the user terminal, taking into account all resources used for the first and second hop (the relaying overhead). Relaying or Multihop operation therefore massively improves the coverage as well as the capacity goals at low cost, without the need of a cable or fiber access. This paper analyzes a realistic urban scenario on the island of Jersey. We study the coverage and capacity over the area in three cases. One base station (BS) only, one BS with four relay nodes (RNs), and the latter plus another ring of nine RNs. The BS has fiber access for rates beyond 100 Mbit/s, while the first hop of Relays (HI) is fed over the air from BS using shared resources in the same LTE band. The second hop H2 is fed by the relays of group HI. In this paper we provide the results from numeric analysis based on models we explain here. It is shown that huge gains in coverage and capacity are obtained by relaying.