A New Insight Towards Buffer-Aided Relaying in Cooperative Wireless Networks

This piece of work presents a novel design for buffer-aided relaying to increase the diversity gain. In this design, we used random buffer access method and associate each buffer location with its own antenna resource. Thus, each buffer location acts as an independent entity known as the virtual relay. The relay selection is based on the instantaneous strength of wireless link and the status of buffers. Markov chain is used to illustrate the growth of buffer status and to derive the closed-form expressions for the outage probability and diversity gain. The proposed design achieves the diversity gain of KL as compared to current buffer-aided max-link and max-max schemes having the diversity gain of 2K and K, respectively. Moreover, the proposed design achieves less delay at low SNR and 1+KL at high SNR. Analytical results are validated via simulation results.