Effective capacity analysis of three node relay networks with adaptive relaying protocols

Effective capacity (EC) is a valuable concept which characterizes the delay bound violation probability as the most important quality of service (QOS) performance metric in realtime applications. This concept helps us to investigate the effects of physical layer infrastructure on the data link layer delay QoS performance. In this paper the EC of a three node relay network with different adaptive relaying protocols, consist of selection relaying and incremental relaying, is analyzed and the closed form expression of ECs is derived. The validation of our results confirm with numerical analysis. In addition, we compare EC and subsequently delay QoS performance of different relaying protocols. It is shown that the behavior of EC directly depends on the spectral efficiency of relaying protocol and the quality of S-R link.