Coverage Performance of Joint Transmission for Moving Relay Enabled Cellular Networks in Dense Urban Scenarios

Journal article, 2017

Communication plays a significant role in terms of providing connectivity for urban users as well as sensors in smart cities. It has been shown that better communication capability for vehicular users can be obtained by introducing moving relays (MRs). With MRs, it is possible for macro base stations and moving relays to serve non-vehicular macro-users by performing coordinated multipoint (CoMP) joint transmission (JT). A bias-based CoMP scheme for MR enabled cellular network is analyzed in this paper. Motivated by antenna design constraints, in this paper, we assume that the outdoor antenna system of the MR can only be used for the moving backhaul link, i.e., the in-vehicle antenna system is also serving the non-vehicular macro-users. Using the stochastic geometry approach, a tractable model of the network is proposed. Based on the proposed model, integral expressions for CoMP-JT probability and coverage probability of non-vehicular macro user equipment are derived. Simulations verify the accuracy of the derived expressions. The results show that the probability for macro user equipment to be served with CoMP-JT is up to 70% when the intensity of MRs is ten times that of MBSs. This paper also includes a performance comparison among the analyzed scheme and related works. CoMP-JT with MRs provides better coverage performance for nearby macro user equipment. It can be found that the coverage gain of CoMP increases when the intensity of MRs increases within a certain range. Simulation results provide insights for practical system design in smart cities, such as the optimal MR intensity and the feasibility for opening access of MRs to macro user equipment.