Opportunistic Buffered Decode-Wait-and-Forward (OBDWF) Protocol for Mobile Wireless Relay Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces the OBDWF protocol that leverages relay buffering and mobility to significantly improve throughput and delay performance in mobile wireless relay networks, especially under bursty traffic conditions.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel OBDWF protocol that outperforms existing methods by achieving higher throughput and lower delay through opportunistic relay buffering and mobility exploitation.

Findings

Achieves asymptotic throughput of O(logK) with constant total power.

Outperforms conventional protocols like DDF and AF in throughput and delay.

Provides closed-form expressions for throughput and delay performance.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an opportunistic buffered decode-wait-and-forward (OBDWF) protocol to exploit both relay buffering and relay mobility to enhance the system throughput and the end-to-end packet delay under bursty arrivals. We consider a point-to-point communication link assisted by K mobile relays. We illustrate that the OBDWF protocol could achieve a better throughput and delay performance compared with existing baseline systems such as the conventional dynamic decode-and-forward (DDF) and amplified-and-forward (AF) protocol. In addition to simulation performance, we also derived closed-form asymptotic throughput and delay expressions of the OBDWF protocol. Specifically, the proposed OBDWF protocol achieves an asymptotic throughput O(logK) with O(1) total transmit power in the relay network. This is a significant gain compared with the best known performance in conventional protocols (O(logK) throughput with O(K) total transmit power). With bursty arrivals, we show that both the stability region and average delay of the proposed OBDWF protocol can achieve order-wise performance gain O(K) compared with conventional DDF protocol.