On Buffer-Assisted Opportunistic Routing Relying on Linear Transmission Activation Probability Space Partitioning for Relay-Aided Networks

In this paper buffer-aided Opportunistic Routing (OR) was designed with the aid of the novel concept of linear Transmission Activation Probability Space (TAPS) partitioning invoked for relay-assisted networks, which combines the benefits of both OR [1] and of buffer-aided transmissions [2]. More specifically, a packet may be transmitted from the Source Node (SN) to the Destination Node (DN) either directly or indirectly via one of the M Relay Nodes (RNs), depending on the instantaneous channel qualities. The above-mentioned linear multi-dimensional TAPS partitioning concept is proposed for partitioning the transmission space into (2M+1) transmission regions plus an outage region, while ensuring that the number of input packets is equal to the number of output packets at each RN´s buffer. The benefit of having a buffer and tolerating the associated delay is that the best channel is activated for transmission based on our linear TAPS partitioning method.