Spectral-Efficient Cellular Communications With Coexistent One- and Two-Hop Transmissions

The cellular communications scenario involving the coexistence of the one-hop direct transmission and the two-hop relaying is studied in this paper. In contrast to conventional cellular systems featuring orthogonal information flows served by decoupled channel resources via, e.g., time division, we propose a novel protocol in which two information flows are served simultaneously via the shared channel resource, thus constituting a spectral-efficient solution for cellular communications. On the other hand, however, an inevitable issue associated with the proposed protocol is the interflow interference, which may lead to serious deterioration on both information flows. To tackle this issue, we develop an overhearing-based protocol that utilizes the overheard interference as useful side information in the receiver design. Specifically, depending on the interference levels, an adaptive linear minimum mean squared error (MMSE) and nonlinear MMSE successive interference cancellation (SIC) receiver exploiting the overheard interference at the direct mobile terminal is developed. To balance between the two information flows, we develop the asymptotically optimum superposition coding at the base station (BS) in the high-power regime. Furthermore, the optimum relay beamforming matrix maximizing the bottleneck of the achievable rates of the two information flows is developed subject to a finite power constraint. Finally, simulations demonstrate a remarkable throughput gain over the conventional cellular systems.