Multi-hop Moving Relays for IMT-Advanced and Beyond

— Relaying is a promising enhancement to current radio technologies, which has been considered in IMT-Advanced candidate technologies such as 3GPP LTE-Advanced and IEEE 802.16m. Relay enhanced networks are expected to fulfill the demanding coverage and capacity requirements in a cost efficient way. Among various relaying architectures multi-hop moving relays can provide additional capacity for the cases when fixed relays are inaccessible or not able to provide adequate solutions in terms of cost. In this paper, an overview of multi-hop moving relays along with some of the envisioned deployment scenarios is presented. Furthermore, different types of multi-hop moving relays are discussed and the challenges are addressed.