A Novel Probabilistic Buffer-Aided Relay Selection Scheme in Cooperative Networks

This paper proposes a novel probabilistic buffer-aided (BA) relay selection (RS) scheme for cooperative relay networks. Different from most existing BA RS schemes that are determined by the wireless channel condition and the buffer state, the proposed scheme also utilizes additional randomness to decide the link selection outcome. In particular, we first select the strongest available source-to-relay and relay-to-destination links, respectively, and then probabilistically select one from these two links. Some previously proposed BA RS schemes can be viewed as special cases of the proposed scheme, such as the max-link scheme and the scheme with reduced packet delay. Then, the outage probability and average packet delay are analyzed. Both the analytical and simulation results show that different tradeoffs between the outage probability and average packet delay can be easily achieved by adjusting a single corresponding parameter.