Understanding the Impact of Interference on Collaborative Relays

Collaborative relays achieve the benefits of spatial diversity without requiring physical antenna arrays at end devices. While many studies have demonstrated its effectiveness in an isolated source-destination system, applying cooperative relays to large-scale wireless networks remains challenging. We show that a system with cooperative relays can be penalized by the extra level of interference it produces. By examining the inter-dependency between interference management and cooperative relay strategies, we model the penalty by an increase in spectrum resource usage and translate it into a penalty in single-link throughput. This penalty serves as a reference for cooperative relay design in isolated scenarios. We then present two practical spectrum allocation mechanisms for collaborative relay systems with different fairness and utilization tradeoffs. Simulation results confirm our analytically findings.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: TMC
• Authors: Yan Zhu, Haitao Zheng
• Keywords: Cooperative Relay, Large-scale Wireless Networks, Physical Antenna Arrays, TMC 2008