Buffer-Aided Relay Selection With Equal-Weight Links in Cooperative Wireless Networks

In this letter, we discuss multiple links with equal weights, in buffer size based relay selection schemes in cooperative wireless networks. A general relay selection factor is defined, which includes the weight of the link as the first metric and the link quality, or priority, as the second metric for different cases of the same weight. The Markov chain based theoretical framework is employed to evaluate the outage probability, delay and throughput of the system. The proposed scheme is evaluated for symmetric and asymmetric channel conditions. The link quality based second selection metric achieves lower outage probability, while the link priority based selection shows significant improvements in terms of delay and throughput. Theoretical results are validated through extensive Monte carlo simulations.