Uplink Performance Optimization in Relay Enhanced
LTE-Advanced Networks
Aydin Karaer*, Ömer Bulakci, Simone Redana,
Bernhard Raaf
Nokia Siemens Networks
Munich, Germany
Abstract— Relaying concept has been proposed to satisfy the
demanding requirements of LTE-Advanced which was recently
agreed by 3GPP as an evolution of LTE. Relay enhanced
networks are expected to enhance the coverage and capacity in a
cost efficient way. Yet, transmit power of UE should be optimized
in a relay based scenario where interference increases by
additional RNs. New cell edges introduced by RNs increase the
number of users that transmit with high power. This leads to
severe interference, in particular when a large number of RNs
are deployed in a cell with reuse one. In this paper, performance
evaluation of relay based deployment within the LTE-Advanced
uplink framework is carried out by applying the standardized
LTE power control scheme both at eNBs and RNs. The
importance of power control parameter settings is examined to
achieve optimal performance in relay scenarios.
Keywords - LTE-Advanced, uplink, power control, relay node
I. INTRODUCTION
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term
Evolution (LTE) standardization has reached a mature level.
Latest set of standards with Release 8 are expected to be ready
during 2009. On the other hand, in April 2008, 3GPP agreed on
its candidate technology named LTE-Advanced to fulfill the
requirements of IMT-Advanced (International Mobile
Telecommunications Advanced) which was defined by ITU
(International Telecommunication Union). According to the
requirements, LTE-Advanced is expected to provide high data
rates while maintaining coverage proportional to LTE
Release 8. The first set of requirements on 3GPP LTE-
Advanced was approved in June 2008 [1]. They include peak
data rates of 1 Gbps in downlink (DL) and 500 Mbps in uplink
(UL), bandwidth scalability up to 100 MHz, increased spectral
efficiency up to 15 bps/Hz in UL and 30 bps/Hz in DL,
improved cell edge capacity, as well as decreased user and
control plane latencies relative to LTE Release 8.
The expected high data rate transmission with the
upcoming future wireless communication networks
necessitates upgrades for the current network paradigm and
Decode and Forward (DF) relaying is considered one of the
potential new technologies to meet the challenging
requirements of LTE-Advanced. It is expected that relays
improve cell edge capacity, lower OPEX, reduce backhaul
costs and enhance network topology. An overview of relay
based deployment can be found in [2] .Performance evaluation
of relay nodes with a cost modeling within the LTE framework
has been studied in [3] [4].
* M.Sc. student at Helsinki University of Technology.
Jyri Hämäläinen
Helsinki University of Technology
Espoo, Finland
Heterogeneous cell deployment for LTE-Advanced will
contain small, low power nodes (regarded as relays in this
work) and require a more detailed dimensioning and planning
than conventional single-hop networks. Relays will create
severe intra-cell and inter-cell interference in particular when a
large number of relay nodes are deployed in the cell with reuse
one. Then Power Control (PC) becomes an important means in
the uplink transmission of relay scenarios to mitigate this
interference and to increase the cell edge and thus, system
capacity. Hence, the fractional power control scheme that is
currently used in LTE [5] needs to be investigated in relay
based deployment to achieve optimal performance.
This paper considers the uplink fractional power control in
relay scenarios within the LTE-Advanced framework.
Performance evaluation is carried out for the LTE Release 8
compliant uplink power control scheme and is applied at both
evolved Node Bs (eNBs) and relay nodes (RNs). Parameter
optimization and transmit power setup are examined to offer
optimal performance in relay scenarios.
The paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the
uplink power control in LTE, the applied relay based
deployment and simulation assumptions. Power control
parameter optimization and system performance evaluation in
case of one-tier relay deployment at the cell border is provided
in Section III. The paper is concluded in Section IV.
II. SYSTEM MODEL
In this section, we first recall the fractional power control
(FPC) scheme of LTE, then the relay enhanced cell scenario is
introduced and system simulation assumptions are given.
A. Power control
Thanks to Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple
Access (SC-FDMA) users in LTE uplink are orthogonal and
intra-cell interference, which is typical for CDMA based
systems such as WCDMA and HSPA, is not of concern.
However, inter-cell interference may become a bottleneck. As
a result, power control becomes vital to maintain the required
SINR in varying interference conditions. In LTE, the so-called
fractional power control is used [5]:
P = min{Pmax , P0 +10⋅ log10 M + α ⋅ L + ΔTF (i) + f (i)} . (1)
Here Pmax is the maximum allowed transmit power of user
equipment (UE), P0 is a parameter used for controlling the
SINR target and M is the number of physical resource blocks C. System-level simulator and simulation assumptions
(PRBs) allocated to one UE. The PRB defines the resource A Matlab based snap-shot simulator is used for the
allocation granularity in LTE and there are e.g. 48 PRBs performance evaluation considering 3GPP Case 1 (inter-site
available for data transmission when the system is operating on distance 500 m) scenario. The simulator follows the current
10 MHz bandwidth. Furthermore, in (1) α is the path loss 3GPP LTE-Advanced evaluation guidelines in [8] 1 . Detailed
compensation factor, L is the downlink path loss calculated at simulation parameters are listed in Table I. The network layout
UE based on the reference signal, and Δ TF (i ) and f (i ) are is formed by 19 sites with 3 hexagonal sectors in each. Wrap-
UE specific closed loop correction value and MCS offset, around is not applied, but instead statistics are collected only
respectively. Since this work focuses on open loop power from the midmost sector.
control, the latter two parameters are omitted and the following
The 3GPP test channel models are applied in the direct and
formula is applied:
access links while the relay link is assumed to be ideal, as the
P = min{Pmax , P0 + 10 ⋅ log10 M + α ⋅ L} . (2) focus of this work is on setting power control parameters at
UE. The power control parameter setting at RNs for uplink
If α = 1 in (2), then the path loss is fully compensated and
the resulting scheme is called full compensation power control TABLE I. SIMULATION PARAMETERS
(FCPC). Yet, it has been shown in [6][7] that inter-cell Parameters Default
interference can be reduced by using values α <1. Performance
Carrier frequency 2 GHz
evaluation of currently applied FPC scheme can be found 10 MHz (48 PRBs for data + 2
in [6]. Advantages of FPC over FCPC scheme have been System bandwidth
PRBs for signaling)
investigated in [7]. The applicability of the existing FPC for the 19 sites - 3 sectors/site
relay enhanced cells needs to be studied as backward System layout
9 RNs/sector (1 tier)
compatibility between Release 8 terminals and LTE-Advanced Inter-site distance (ISD) 3GPP Case 1 (500m)
is strongly promoted. Hence, it is highly unlikely that a new Number of users per sector 48
power control scheme would be introduced just to support relay Frequency planning Reuse 1 (full interference)
operations. Consequently, the derivation of the optimal eNB-UE
parameter setting for the relay scenario is needed. L = 128.1 + 37.6 log10 R
eNB-RN
B. Relay scenario Channel models L = 124.5 + 37.6 log10 R
RN-UE
In the considered two-hop relay based deployment, each L = 140.7 + 36.7 log 10 R
UE is either served directly by eNB or indirectly by eNB via R : distance in kilometers
RN. The naming conventions of direct link (between eNB and Penetration loss 20 dB (direct and access links)
UE), access link (between RN and UE) and relay link (between Scheduling Round robin
eNB and RN) are used. Relays are deployed at the cell edge Traffic Model Uplink full buffer
with fixed locations as shown in Fig. 1. Radio access point eNB parameters
selection is based on the downlink received signal power. As Antenna height 25 m (above rooftop)
can be seen in Fig. 1, cell center users and cell edge users are Antennas per sector 2 tx, 2 rx
the users that are not in the coverage area of RNs and the users
served by RNs, respectively. ⎡ ⎛ θ ⎞2 ⎤
A(θ ) = − min ⎢12⎜⎜ ⎟⎟ , Am ⎥
A 20 dB penetration loss is added along with distance Horizontal antenna pattern θ
⎢⎣ ⎝ 3dB ⎠ ⎥⎦
dependent path loss in direct and access links, since indoor Am = 25 dB, θ 3dB = 70 o

users are considered. Yet, relays are located outdoors and thus,
there is no penetration loss in the relay link. Note that in this Maximum transmit power 46 dBm
scenario 22 % of the users are served by 9 RNs (one tier). Maximum antenna gain 14 dBi
Noise figure 5 dB
RN parameters
Antenna height 5m (below rooftop)
Number of antennas 2 tx, 2 rx
Maximum transmit power 30 dBm
Maximum antenna gain 5 dBi
Noise figure 7 dB
UE parameters
Antenna height 1.5m
Number of antennas 1 tx, 2 rx
Maximum transmit power 23 dBm
Maximum antenna gain 0 dBi
Noise figure 9 dB
1
Available parameters in the course of this study. The discussion on
Figure 1. One-tier relay scenario.
simulation assumptions is ongoing in 3GPP.
transmissions to eNB is left for further study. Since the link is
ideally modeled, data received at RN from UE are forwarded to
eNB without any loss and thus, the end-to-end throughput is
equal to the throughput in the access link. The eNB antenna
pattern and maximum antenna gain as well as receiver noise
figures are adopted from [8]. The effects of shadowing and fast
fading are not considered. Reuse one implies that all eNBs and
RNs employ the same radio resources and hence, uplink
transmissions of each eNB and RN interfere with each other. In
each sector, 48 users are uniformly distributed and statistics are
collected after 200 drops. The number of drops is selected to be
so large that the difference between repeated tests is ignorable.
User mobility is not modeled. The SINR results are given per
PRB and throughput is computed from SINR using the
Shannon approximation similarly as described in [9].
III. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
In this study extensive search over whole parameter space
is used for parameter optimization. The notations used are:
• FCPC: Parameter setting for full compensation power
control in eNB-only deployment.
• FPC: Parameter setting for fractional power control in
eNB-only deployment.
• FCPC@eNB & FCPC@RN: Parameter setting for
FCPC in relay based deployment at eNB and RN.
• FPC@eNB & FPC@RN: Parameter setting for FPC
in relay based deployment at eNB and RN.
A. FPC/FCPC parameter settings in eNB-only scenario
The parameter setting in eNB-only scenario is based on the
approach of [6] where it is shown that optimal parameters
depend on the Interference over Thermal (IoT) level in the
system. Recall that IoT indicates the amount of inter-cell
interference in uplink and high IoT values are not desired
because of limitations in receiver dynamic range. Furthermore,
it is shown that FPC parameter setting is a trade-off between
cell coverage and cell capacity 2 such that the path loss
compensation factor of 0.6 provides the optimum performance
when cell capacity is the design goal. On the other hand, full
path loss compensation (FCPC) is suggested when cell
coverage is prioritized. Given these contradictory design goals
two suboptimal parameter settings in line with own simulation
parameters are presented in Table II, where also cell coverage
and capacity are depicted.
TABLE II. PARAMETER CONFIGURATION FOR ENB-ONLY DEPLOYMENT
Cell Coverage-oriented Cell Capacity-oriented
P0 [dBm] & α -83 & 1 (FCPC) -41 & 0.6 (FPC)
Average IoT [dB] 24 25.2
Cell capacity [kbps] 17540 20340
Cell coverage [kbps] 9087 8147
2
The cell coverage and cell capacity are defined as the 5th %-ile user
throughput multiplied by the number of users per sector [6] and aggregate user
throughput per sector, respectively.
Figure 2. CDF of throughput per UE for FCPC@eNB & FCPC@RN
vs. FPC@eNB & FPC@RN in one-tier relay scenario. The CDF curves
go to one at very high throughput levels.
The comparison of the settings shows that the capacity-
oriented design utilizing FPC results in 16% capacity gain over
the coverage-oriented design utilizing FCPC at the cost of a
coverage loss of 10%.
B. Common parameter settings at eNB and RN
This section analyzes the case where the parameter settings
of the eNB-only deployment are applied both at RNs and eNBs
in the relay scenario, providing suboptimal settings. As a
reference to compare the performance of relay enhanced
system, the eNB-only deployment with FPC settings is
considered.
It should be noted that the users which experience low
SINR at the cell edges of the eNB-only deployment are
connected to RNs after the relay node deployment is
introduced. As can be observed in Fig. 2, the relay based
deployment outperforms the eNB-only deployment both in
terms of cell coverage and cell capacity. The users served by
RNs experience very high throughput compared to the ones
served by eNB due to the fact that RNs mostly serve small
number of users in their coverage areas. This in turn leads to
very large bandwidth allocation for each user and high uplink
throughput at the RNs.
The use of parameter settings of the eNB-only deployment
in one-tier relay scenario leads to a state where FCPC@eNB &
FCPC@RN provides higher throughput for the users up to 46
%-ile of the throughput curve, whereas FPC@eNB &
FPC@RN provides better performance for the remaining users.
However, it is observed that using the parameter settings
determined in the eNB-only deployment results in a large
number of power limited users at RNs especially in FPC case,
where 55 % of the users transmit with full power. These users
that are transmitting at the maximum available power
experience unnecessary high throughputs while causing
excessive interference to the users connected to eNBs. Thus,
power control parameter configuration after the deployment of
relay nodes in the system needs to be adjusted to further
improve the performance in relay enhanced uplink.
 Figure 3. CDF of SINR per PRB at eNB in one-tier relay scenario for
different P0 values at RNs.
C. Specific parameter settings at eNB and RN
In this section, different parameter configurations for power
control are discussed. As the reference for performance
evaluation, the eNB-only scenario with FPC is assumed. The
comparisons are made with respect to the CDF of SINR per
PRB at eNB, which is obtained collecting only the statistics of
the cell center users (see Fig. 1) in this reference scenario.
1) Impact of P0 setting at eNB and RN
Parameter P0 has a great impact on the SINR distribution,
as it can be used to control the SINR target [7]. When RNs are
introduced to the system, the power control formula at eNB is
affected due to the change in the number of PRBs given to each
user. More PRBs are assigned to each user at eNB because less
competition occurs due to the fact that 22 % of the users in
macro-cell area are served by RNs. To pinpoint the effect
of P0 , simulations were performed in the relay scenario.
The study of P0 shows that the P0 setting originally
determined in the eNB-only scenario can be still maintained in
the relay scenario for users that are served by eNBs. On the
contrary, the P0 setting of eNB-only scenario is not suitable for
RN cells. It turns out that the eNB-only parameter value
provides good performance for the RN users; however, the
users that are directly connected to eNB suffer from the high
interference due to large number of power limited users served
by RNs. If the value of P0 in RN cells is decreased, then the
transmit power of all users in RN cells is reduced leading to
SINR and throughput increase for the users served by eNB.
From Fig. 3 it is found that 18 dB reduction in P0 value
results in higher SINR performance for the users served by
eNB. User throughput at RNs decreases correspondingly;
however, the throughput values at RNs still remain on a very
high level. Further decrease of P0 reduces the performance of
users served by RNs without significantly improving the
performance of users served by eNB.
2) Reduced maximum transmit power without power
control in RN cells
From system perspective, the simplest approach would be
fixing the UL transmit power in RN cells and not applying
Figure 4. CDF of SINR per PRB at eNB with different maximum
transmit power setups at RNs in one-tier relay scenario.
power control. To investigate this option, it is aimed to find a
proper transmit power level that guarantees feasible SINR
performance for the users served by RNs and improves the
performance of the users served directly by eNBs.
In Fig. 4, the results of SINR distributions at eNB are given
with different maximum fixed transmit power setups at RNs. It
is observed that the interference caused by RN cells is
significant when the transmit power is fixed to maximum
allowable power level, i.e. 23 dBm. The SINR of the users
served by eNBs can be improved by decreasing the transmit
power levels to 7 dBm. Further reduction of the transmit power
does not significantly improve the performance of users
connected to eNB but it decreases the performance of users
served by RNs. It should be noted that receiver dynamic range3
of RNs is around 24 dB without any power control. It can be
concluded that fixed transmit power in RN cells can be
considered as a good candidate since this scheme allows a
simple implementation and operation procedure as long as RN
can handle the dynamic range.
3) Reduced maximum transmit power with P0 setting in
RN cells
RN
Parameters P0 and the maximum UL transmit power ( Pmax )
can be optimized in RN cells contemporary to trade between
the RN and eNB user throughputs. A decrease in the P0 value
at RNs after fixing the maximum transmit power mainly
decreases the power of the cell center users served by RNs in
comparison to the case where fixed transmit power without
power control is applied. As can be seen from the CDF of
SINR at eNB in Fig. 5, lower P0 values at RNs lead to SINR
improvement for the users served by the eNB. It is worth to
note that a fixed maximum transmit power of 15 dBm with 18
dB reduction in P0 value is a compromise that increases the
performance of users served by eNB without penalizing too
much the users served by RNs. The receiver dynamic range of
RNs in this scheme is around 12 dB.
3
The receiver dynamic range is defined as the difference between the 5th%-ile
and 95th%-ile of the CDF of the total received power.
 Figure 5. CDF of SINR per PRB at eNB for decreasing P0 values with
a fixed maximum transmit power level of 15 dBm at RNs in one-tier relay
scenario.
TABLE III. OPTIMIZED PARAMETER CONFIGURATION FOR ONE-TIER
RELAY SCENARIO
Parameters No PC FPC FCPC
RNs eNBs RNs eNBs
P0 [dBm] - -41 -59 -83
α - 0.6 0.6 1 1
Pmax [dBm] 7 23 15 23
D. Comparison of FPC and FCPC with optimized parameter
settings
Performance evaluation in previous sections showed that
performance of FPC can be improved by adjusting the
parameter settings. In this section, the comparison of the
optimal parameter settings of FPC and FCPC is made. The
found optimized parameter settings are given in Table III.
In Fig.6 it can be observed that the following two parameter
settings provide the same performance both for FPC and
FCPC: (i) no power control at RNs with maximum UL transmit
power of 7 dBm; (ii) power control at RNs with maximum UL
transmit power of 15 dBm and optimized P0 at RNs. However,
the receiver dynamic range of RNs in case of power control is
substantially lower (12dB) than that of the no power control
case (24dB). Therefore, the use of the power control at RNs is
recommended in LTE-Advanced networks.
Furthermore, the user throughput CDF plot which is given
in Fig. 6 shows that the optimized FPC settings outperform
FCPC. FPC results in the same 5%-ile user throughput
performance compared to FCPC. In addition, FPC improves
the user throughput over the cell area and outperforms FCPC
by 13% at 50%-ile user throughput at sector.
IV.
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
The uplink power control for LTE-Advanced in relay
deployed scenarios was investigated. Special focus was put on
the power control parameters and the goal was to find out
whether parameters that are currently employed in LTE
Release 8 would be applicable for both eNB and RN in the
relay scenario.
Figure 6. CDF of throughput per UE in one-tier relay scenario. The
curves of optimized FCPC@eNB & RN and FPC@eNB & RN overlap
with FCPC@eNB & No PC@RN and FPC@eNB & No PC@RN,
respectively.
First, it was observed that the system performance is greatly
improved when relays are introduced. However, using the same
power control parameter setting in the relay scenario as in the
RNs eNB-only scenario does not offer best available performance.
-95 Hence, parameter optimization was found to be important so
that better performance in relay scenarios could be achieved.
15 After the parameter optimization, it was found that the use
of the power control at RNs is recommended if the aim is
keeping the receiver dynamic range low. Furthermore, the
fractional power control provides 13 % throughput
improvement at 50%-ile user throughput over the full
compensation power control without penalizing the cell edge
user performance in the relay scenario.
Future work will focus on extending the study to include
user scheduling and different resource partitioning schemes.
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