Performance of Relay-Assisted Heterogeneous Vehicular Networks with Unreliable Backhaul over Double-Rayleigh Fading Channels.       Best Student Paper Award

This paper introduces for the first time a relay-assisted heterogeneous vehicular model including numerous stationary small cells, a mobile relay and a mobile receiver with unreliable backhaul. In this proposed system model, a macro-base station connected to the cloud communicates to numerous small cells through wireless backhaul links. A Bernoulli process is utilized to model the backhaul reliability. A relay using decode-and-forward protocol is considered to help the transmission from the stationary small cells to the mobile receiver. Moreover, at the mobile relay side, a selection combining protocol is applied to maximize the received signal-to-noise ratio. The links between stationary small cells and mobile relay are Rayleigh fading channels, and the link between mobile relay and mobile receiver is double-Rayleigh fading channel. A closed-form expression for outage probability is provided to evaluate the influence of the number of small cells and the backhaul reliability on the proposed system performance.