Capacity Benefits of Relays with In-band Backhauling in Cellular Networks

In this paper, the feasibility and capacity benefits of deploying low-cost relay nodes with in-band wireless backhaul capability in cellular networks are studied. Our proposed scheme is similar to a cell-splitting architecture where the base station density is increased, thus reducing the effective cell size. Cell- splitting provides capacity gains that are proportional to the number of bases deployed, but at significant cost driven primarily by additional wired backhaul requirements. The use of in-band wireless backhaul may significantly reduce the cost, but sharing bandwidth with the backhaul results in reduced access rates rel- ative to that of cell-splitting. we show that a cellular architecture with base stations supplemented by simple decode-and-forward relays can provide significant capacity improvements despite the overhead associated with in-band backhaul.