An FDD Multihop Cellular Network for 3GPP-LTE

The future cellular radio networks like 3G-LTE are based on an OFDMA physical layer. The duplex scheme is preferably frequency division (FDD) because of its advantages in long range. Huge area coverage in a cost-efficient way is important problem for the early deployment. Time after time the demand in densely populated areas will grow, so a higher cell capacity over the area is needed. The requirements are expensive to solve with a traditional cellular architecture, because a fibre line access will be needed at any base station location, which are sometimes only a few 100 meters apart. This paper deals with multihop operation as an option to improve the coverage as well as the capacity issue at low cost. Homogeneous relays act like base stations, but without the need of a cable or fibre access. They are simply fed by the same radio technology in their first hop. The contribution of this paper is especially the multihop operation in the FDD mode and performance results for the throughput on the MAC-layer. The results were obtained with an analytic model, numerically evaluated with Matlab.