The Potential of Moving Relays - A Performance Analysis

Paper in proceeding, 2012

In this paper we show the potential of moving relay nodes (MRNs) for improving the capacity, reliability and coverage of future wireless networks. To this end we study and compare the performance of single-hop direct transmission, dual-hop MRN assisted transmission as well as dual-hop fixed relay node (FRN) assisted transmission. For an accurate comparison we derive the optimal FRN position minimizing the outage probability (OP) when the user position is known as a function of the pathloss, transmit power and vehicle penetration loss (VPL). The problem is investigated for Rayleigh fading channels and when the cell coverage area is fixed. We show that when VPL is moderate to high, MRN assisted transmission greatly outperforms transmission through FRNs as well as direct transmission, and is very promising for future wireless systems.