Energy, Delay, and Outage Analysis of a Buffer-Aided Three-Node Network Relying on Opportunistic Routing

In this contribution, we propose and study a bufferaided opportunistic routing (BOR) scheme, which combines the benefits of both opportunistic routing and multihop diversity (MHD) aided transmissions. It was conceived for a buffer-aided three-node network (B3NN) composed of a source node (SN), a buffer-aided relay node (RN) and a destination node (DN). In this network, there are three channels namely the SN-RN, RN-DN and SN-DN channels. The key motivation is that we are aiming for activating the specific channels requiring a recuded energy dissipation. In order to study this problem, a three-dimensional (3D) transmission activation probability space (TAPS) is proposed, which is divided into four regions representing each of the three channels plus an outage region. In a specific time slot (TS), the instantaneous channel fading values may be directly mapped to a specific point in this 3D channel space. The BOR scheme then relies on the position of this point to select the most appropriate channel for its transmission. Both the energy dissipation and the outage probability (OP) are investigated for transmission in this network. The results show that when the system is operated at a normalized throughput of 0.4 packet/TS, the energy dissipation was reduced by 24.8% to 77.6% compared to three different benchmark schemes. Alternatively, our technique is capable of reducing the OP by 89.6% when compared to conventional opportunistic routing. As in all buffer-aided system, the performance improved with the cost of higher packet delay, which is also studied.