Delay constrained buffer-aided relaying with outdated CSI

Recent studies have shown that buffer-aided relaying with adaptive link selection can provide significant performance gains compared to conventional relaying using a fixed transmission schedule. In this paper, we focus on error rate analysis of adaptive link selection for a three node decode-and-forward (DF) relay network with fixed-rate transmission. As in practice link selection may be performed based on outdated channel state information (CSI) because of a delay in the feedback link, we study the error rate performance for both perfect and outdated CSI. Since a packet transmission delay is unavoidable with opportunistic link selection, we provide a unified error-rate analysis in terms of a decision threshold β which can be adjusted to achieve buffer stability and a desired average system delay. We show that a diversity gain of two can be achieved for perfect CSI and the optimum BER can be approached even if only a small delay is tolerated.