Buffer-aided relay selection with reduced packet delay in cooperative networks

Applying data buffers at relay nodes significantly improves the outage performance in relay networks, but the performance gain is often at the price of long packet delays. In this paper, a novel relay selection scheme with significantly reduced packet delay is proposed. The outage probability and average packet delay of the proposed scheme under different channel scenarios are analyzed. Simulation results are also given to verify the analysis. The analytical and simulation results show that, compared with non-buffer-aided relay selection schemes, the proposed scheme has not only significant gain in outage performance but also similar average packet delay when the channel SNR is high enough, making it an attractive scheme in practice.