Adaptive link selection and power allocation buffer-aided relay networks with multiple sources

We consider a relay network with M nodes (terminals) that act as sources. The nodes send uplink data to a common destination through a relay that is equipped with a buffer. There are no direct links between each terminal and the destination. The nodes are backlogged and always have data to send. We develop a protocol which can make full use of the involved links adaptively, including the link selection and power allocation, based on the channel state information(CSI). We jointly optimize the link selection policy and power allocation for the average throughput maximization by limiting the total average power budget for all the nodes in the considered network. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol exceeds the buffer-aided multiuser relaying protocol without power allocation, especially in the region of a low power budget. It is also shown that power allocation deals efficiently with the bottleneck problem.