Fan Rui

Design and field measurement of TD-LTE nomadic relay and backhaul

As a feature defined in Release 10 of 3GPP, TD-LTE relay has the ability to improve the cell edge throughput and expand coverage as well as to provide high speed wireless backhaul link. Ericsson as the technology leader in TD-LTE area built “TD-LTE nomadic in-band relay” prototype in 2011. For the prototype, the access link is totally compatible with the 3GPP TD-LTE Release 8 specification, which allows using commercial terminals for field measurement of the relay performance. The nomadic relay emulated the relay that the antennas for the relay UE and relay eNB are closely located which is one of the appearance of the relay product in the future where the relay could be plug-and-play. In this paper, wireless backhaul channel characteristics in various deployment scenarios and the throughput performance are measured when nomadic relay is deployed. It is found in the measurements that when the relay UE antenna is directional antenna, the direction of the antenna should be to the large reflections or diffractions. Relay can greatly improve the throughput in NLOS backhaul scenario in poor coverage area from the donor and provide coverage extension for the non-coverage area. The TD-LTE nomadic relay could be placed at most of the area of the cell edge of the donor cell with moderate backhaul link performance.