User Cooperation Scheduling in Cellular Systems

Given its capability in efficient resource/load sharing between Uu link and sidelink (SL), user equipment (UE) cooperation has been identified as a promising technology in 5G evolution to improve the network capacity, coverage and transmission latency. This paper considers the design of practical transmission scheme from industrial perspective. The challenge lies in the modeling of physical layer behaviors of UE cooperation, including cooperative scheduling between target UE (TUE) and cooperative UE (CUE) which plays an important role in cooperative UE transmission and reception. This paper investigates the UE cooperation performance with proposed scheduling schemes for both uplink (UL) and downlink (DL), where the evaluation results show that UE cooperation could significantly improve the cell average throughput and cell edge throughput.