Energy Dissipation Versus Delay Tradeoffs in a Buffer-Aided Two-Hop Link

Our motivation is to characterize the hitherto unexplored tradeoff between energy dissipation and delay in a buffer-aided two-hop link. First, the optimality of 2-D Transmission Activation Probability Space (TAPS) partitioning is formally shown both in the presence and absence of an outage region. Then, the relationship between packet energy dissipation and block delay is found, which is established with the aid of a buffer-state transition matrix. Moreover, the concept of "artificial outage" is introduced and applied for striking a flexible tradeoff between energy dissipation and block delay. Then, an algorithm is provided for finding the matching block delay and energy dissipation pairs. Our analysis and performance results demonstrate that the proposed methods provide a significantly wider and more flexible tradeoff range than all other methods, while reducing the average packet delay and/ or the energy dissipation.