Buffer occupancy based DF and AF relaying in Nakagami-m fading channels

Despite significant performance gains, buffer-aided cooperative communication incurs an increased latency. It is handled by prioritizing relay-to-destination links. The contribution of this paper is two-fold, firstly, we studied buffer threshold based decode-and-forward (DF) relaying for Rayleigh fading channels in Nakagami-m fading channels. Secondly, we present the outage analysis of buffer occupancy based amplify and forward (AF) relaying by introducing a modified threshold in terms of signal to noise ratio at relay and destination, which enables the conventional Markov chain (MC) based analysis of DF relaying to work for AF relaying with slight modifications. Using this approach, we evaluate the system using MC-based analysis for outage probability, latency and throughput. The results depict that the buffer threshold based relaying can significantly decrease the latency and increase the average throughput by negotiating the outage probability. Furthermore, extensive Monte-Carlo simulations are carried out to prove the theoretical outcomes. © 2019 IEEE