Relay Enhanced LTE-Advanced Networks

3rd Generation Project Partnership (3GPP) proposed the 4th generation mobile telecommunications (4G) technology [1], one such technology being Long-Term Evolution -Advanced (LTE-Advanced) to the ITU-T, which aims to improve the already existing Long Term Evolution (LTE-Release 8) technology. The need to provide high peak data rate to the meet of the demands of the market lead to enhancement of LTE- Release 8 which is LTE-A, that will provide an improved coverage range and increased bandwidth availability to end users. As LTE advanced is an enhanced version 8 rather than a total departure from LTE-Release 8. With LTE-Advanced having an increase in bandwidth of up to 100MHz that is achieved by means of carrier aggregation technique [2]. The main aim of this paper is to provide a detailed overview of relay concepts in LTE technology and discuss the advancement from LTE towards LTE-Advanced technology with references to LTE supporting technologies such as Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM), Coordinated Multi-Point transmission (CoMP), Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Carrier Aggression and issues involved in its implementations.