Buffer-Aided Relay Selection for Cooperative Relay Networks With Certain Information Rates and Delay Bounds

In this paper, we propose a relay selection scheme for cooperative buffer-aided relay networks with specific information rates and delay bounds. The proposed scheme differs from most of the well-known schemes in the literature that assume the source is saturated with data and/or without delay constraints. The proposed scheme is designed to encompass the delay-sensitive applications that are subject to delay limits and have certain rates. The proposed scheme exploits the channel state information, buffer state information, and delay state information to minimize the outage probability and achieve higher throughput. To achieve that, it uses these information to compromise between the selections of relays for reception and transmission. The proposed scheme is analyzed in the independent and identically distributed and independent and nonidentically distributed Rayleigh fading channels. The analysis is in terms of outage probability, packet dropping probability of the source node, packet dropping probability of the entire system, and throughput. For systems with high delay constraints, simulation results show that the proposed scheme offers lower packet dropping probability and higher throughput as compared to the renowned relay selection schemes.