Buffer State Based Relay Selection for Half-Duplex Buffer-Aided Serial Relaying Systems

This work investigates multi-hop serial relaying half-duplex (HD) networks comprising one source, one destination and
$K$
decode-and-forward (DF) relays. Buffer-aided (BA) relays are considered where finite size buffers are added to relays. For this setup, we propose a novel BA relaying strategy that selects the node that must transmit over one epoch in a block fading environment. Selecting a node depends on the buffer state information of all relays and on the availability of the hops. Moreover, the proposed relaying scheme is controlled by an adjustable parameter that allows the system to achieve multiple levels of tradeoff between the average packet delay (APD) and the outage probability (OP). A Markov chain model is adopted to evaluate the system’s performance and simple closed-form expressions were derived for the APD and OP based on an asymptotic analysis. The performance analysis proves the ability of the suggested relaying scheme to achieve significant OP and APD gains with small buffer sizes. Two variants of the proposed relaying scheme are particularly appealing. The APD-prioritizing variant achieves the smallest APD of
$2K$
without improving the diversity order. The second OP-prioritizing variant reaches the full diversity order of
$K+1$
while increasing the asymptotic APD to
$K(K+3)$
.