Uplink performance of LTE-based multi-hop cellular network with out-of-band relaying

In this paper, we present a new architecture to mitigate inter-cell interference in the uplink and improve the uplink capacity of Long Term Evolution (LTE), which is named LTE-based multi-hop cellular networks with out-of-band relaying. Based on the receiving reference signal strength of User Equipments (UEs), each cell is divided into two parts, the inner circle and the outer ring. Each UE is dual-mode including an LTE air interface and an IEEE 802.11 air interface. An active UE in outer ring is free to choose an available idle UE in inner circle as a relay station (RS) within its IEEE 802.11 radio coverage area for dual-hop communication with the E-UTRAN NodeB (eNB). We analyze the probability of RS selection under this architecture. Then an analytic mode is used to compute the effect on uplink capacity. Our results show that system's uplink capacity can be improved significantly when some parameters are appropriately selected.