Buffer-Aided Cooperative Phase Steering Technique for Delay-Tolerant Networks

In this paper, we propose a novel buffer-aided cooperative phase steering (B-CPS) technique for delay-tolerant wireless networks (DTNs). In the proposed B-CPS technique, all relay nodes (RNs) that succeed in data decoding from a source node (SN) deliver the original signal of SN to a destination node (DN) with a decode-and-forward (DF) manner. With the property of DTNs, the signal from the SN is allowed to be delayed at RNs, and thus all the RNs that succeeded in decoding wait until a certain condition is satisfied, which the minimum channel gain from the RNs to the DN exceeds a threshold. When the condition is satisfied, all the RNs send the received signal to the DN with the CPS technique. Simulation results show that the proposed B-CPS significantly outperforms the conventional CPS technique in terms of outage probability.