Relay Selection for Cooperative Relaying Networks With Small Buffers

Buffer-aided relaying, which combines relay selection and packet buffering, has recently been studied to mitigate throughput and multiplexing gain loss of two-hop relaying protocols. However, existing buffer-aided relaying schemes require large buffers and a long initialization process for minimizing the outage probability. In this paper, a new buffer-aided relaying scheme is proposed that considers both instantaneous buffer status and channel state information (CSI) for making the relay selection decision. Theoretical analysis is performed to get some insights into the proposed scheme. We present numerical results to validate the analysis accuracy and demonstrate the improvement of the proposed scheme in terms of outage probability, buffer size requirement, and average delay, compared with existing buffer-aided relaying schemes.