Cooperative broadcasting schemes for LTE-A

In LTE E-MBMS, the fundamental technique is single frequency network (SFN), which simplifies the design of receiver. Under the architecture of SFN, the spectral efficiency is constrained by the maximum transmission power of the base station. According to the evaluation results of LTE E-MBMS, the maximum achievable spectral efficiency is around 1bit/s/Hz, however which can not meet the LTE-A requirement. For further improvements, one of the promising techniques is cooperative communication. However, the current cooperative schemes are difficult to be standardized due to the complexity and network management issues. In this paper, we present some practical cooperative schemes which can be adopted in LTE-A.