Cellular Systems with Non-Regenerative Relaying and Cooperative Base Stations

In this paper, the performance of cellular networks with joint multicell processing and dedicated relay terminals is investigated. It is assumed that each relay terminal is capable of full-duplex operation and receives the transmission of relay terminals in adjacent cells. Focusing on intra-cell time division multiple access and non-fading channels, a simplified relay-aided uplink cellular model is considered. Addressing the achievable per-cell sum-rate, two non-regenerative relaying schemes are considered. Interpreting the received signal at the base stations as the outcome of a two-dimensional linear time invariant system, the multicell processing rate of an amplify-and-forward scheme is derived and shown to decrease with the inter-relay interference level. A novel form of distributed compress-and-forward scheme with decoder side information is then proposed. The corresponding multicell processing rate, which is given as a solution of a simple fixed-point equation, reveals that the compress-and-forward scheme is able to completely eliminate the inter-relay interference, and it approaches a "cut-set-like" upper bound for strong relay terminal transmission power. The benefits of base-station cooperation via multicell processing over the conventional single site processing approach is also demonstrated for both protocols.