Theoretical Analysis and Performance Simulation of In-Band LTE Mobile Relays in Railway Environments

Nowadays the number of vehicular users demanding mobile data services greatly increases due to the high penetration rate of smartphones, laptops and tablets. Under this scope, the 3GPP working group for LTE standardization, is paying more attention on vehicular scenarios, like railways environments. The proposed solution for improving performance in high speed railways scenario, is the mobile relay node. The authors focus on Type-1 in-band relays, which have been proposed for LTE-Advanced. In this work, authors investigate the issue of mobile relay capacity improvement for on-board train users and its impact on the overall network performance. Besides, the impact of several key configuration parameters of MRN, like the number of MBSFN subframes, will be assessed.