Performance Analysis of Hybrid Buffer-Aided Cooperative Protocol Based on Half-Duplex and Virtual Full-Duplex Relay Selections

This paper proposes a buffer-aided relay selection that is capable of exploiting both half-duplex and virtual full-duplex (VFD) transmissions in a hybrid manner. In the proposed scheme, we consider a two-hop cooperative network where each node is equipped with a single antenna, and no direct link between the source to the destination exists. The proposed scheme consists of five relay selection modes: two unicast modes, a broadcast mode, a cooperative beamforming mode, and a VFD mode. Owing to the broadcast mode, multiple relay nodes can seamlessly have a common packet; this mode is capable of solving the inter-relay interference problem imposed on the VFD mode. The proposed scheme's theoretical performance bounds on the throughput, the outage probability, and the delay are derived. It is demonstrated in our simulations that the proposed scheme attains higher performance in terms of a throughput and an outage probability than the conventional schemes while maintaining an acceptable average end-to-end delay profile.