Repeaters have been an attractive solution for mobile operators to upgrade their wireless networks at low cost and to extend
network coverage effectively. Since the first LTE commercial deployment in 2009, many mobile operators have launched LTE
networks by upgrading their 3G and legacy networks. Because all 3G frequency bands are shared with the frequency bands
for LTE deployment and 3G mobile operators have an enormous number of repeaters, reusing 3G repeaters in LTE networks is
definitely a practical and cost-efficient solution. However, 3G repeaters usually do not support spatial multiplexing with multiple
antennas, and thus it is difficult to reuse them directly in LTE networks. In order to support spatial multiplexing of LTE, the role
of 3G repeaters should be replaced with small LTE base stations or MIMO-capable repeaters. In this paper, a repeater network
is proposed to reuse 3G repeaters in LTE deployment while still supporting multilayer transmission of LTE. Interestingly, the
proposed network has a higher cluster throughput than an LTE network with MIMO-capable repeaters
