Capacity improvement through buffer-aided successive opportunistic relaying

In this work, we propose a buffer-aided successive opportunistic relaying scheme that aims to improve the average capacity of the network when inter-relay interference arises between relays that are selected for transmission and reception. In order to exploit the benefits of buffering at the relays, we propose a relay-pair selection policy that decouples the receiving relay at the previous time slot from being the transmitting relay at the next slot. Furthermore, we impose an interference cancellation threshold allowing the relay that is selected for reception, to decode and subtract the inter-relay interference. The proposed relaying scheme selects the relaying pair that maximizes the average capacity of the relay network. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated via simulation and comparisons with other state-of-the-art half and full-duplex relay selection schemes, in terms of outage probability, average capacity and average delay. The results reveal the need for a tradeoff between improving the outage on the cost of reduced capacity and increased delay, and vice versa. Finally, conclusions are drawn and future directions are discussed, including the need for a hybrid scheme incorporating both half and full-duplex characteristics.