Cooperative communications for LTE-advanced-relay and CoMP

SUMMARYThe Long Term Evolution‐Advanced (LTE‐A) system is currently under development to allow for significantly higher spectral efficiency and data throughput than the LTE systems. In a wireless system based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with frequency reuse factor one, the achievable cell spectral efficiency is often limited by the inter‐cell interference or coverage shortage of base stations. In LTE‐A, coordinated multi‐point transmission/reception (a.k.a. multi‐cell MIMO or base station cooperation) and relaying technologies are being introduced to clear these major performance hurdles. In this paper, cooperative communication technologies being discussed in LTE‐A systems are presented, together with considerations on system design. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. In cellular wireless communication networks, low spectral efficiency is caused by either coverage or interference limitation. In Long Term Evolution‐Advanced, relaying and coordinated multi‐point transmissions are respectively introduced for the coverage‐limited and the interference‐limited scenarios.