Statistical Delay Tradeoffs in Buffer-Aided Two-Hop Wireless Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates how statistical delay constraints affect the maximum achievable rate in buffer-aided two-hop wireless systems, revealing tradeoffs and the benefits of asymmetric delay constraints for improved throughput.

Contribution

It introduces a framework to analyze the delay tradeoff in two-hop links and derives the maximum supported rates considering statistical delay constraints and system parameters.

Findings

Asymmetric delay constraints can enhance achievable rates.

Effective capacity depends on delay constraints, SNR, and fading distributions.

Tradeoff characterization guides optimal buffer delay settings.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of statistical delay constraints on the achievable rate of a two-hop wireless communication link, in which the communication between a source and a destination is accomplished via a buffer-aided relay node. It is assumed that there is no direct link between the source and the destination, and the buffer-aided relay forwards the information to the destination by employing the decode-and-forward scheme. Given statistical delay constraints specified via maximum delay and delay violation probability, the tradeoff between the statistical delay constraints imposed on any two concatenated queues is identified. With this characterization, the maximum constant arrival rates that can be supported by this two-hop link are obtained by determining the effective capacity of such links as a function of the statistical delay constraints, signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) at the source and relay, and the fading distributions of the links. It is shown that asymmetric statistical delay constraints at the buffers of the source and relay node can improve the achievable rate. Overall, the impact of the statistical delay tradeoff on the achievable throughput is provided.