A New Cellular Network Structure Deploying Shared Relays with Sectorization

Abstract

To mitigate inter-cell interference, which causes throughput degradation for cell-edge users, a shared relay with sector antennas that are connected to neighboring base stations (BSs) with optical cable is deployed in the cell boundary. Each sector of the shared relays can be considered a remote antenna directed to the connected BS. By controlling the transmit power, inter-cell interference can be mitigated and high-throughput performance can be achieved. Additionally, better handover performance can be obtained by reducing unnecessary handovers caused by ambiguity in the cell boundary. Through computer simulations with the hexagonal cell structure and the proposed shared relay with three sectors, performance gain of the proposed system deployment was verified.