Outage Analysis of Dual-Hop Transmission with Buffer Aided Amplify-and-Forward Relay

A new packet-selection based transmission scheme is proposed on a dual-hop link with buffer aided amplify-and-forward relay, where the relay with a buffer can record the channel information of source-relay hop and store the received packets. In order to satisfy the constraint of equivalent end-to-end SNR, the relay may pick up a packet in the buffer to transmit, with consideration of the channel statuses of both the source-relay hop and the relay-destination hop. Therefore, by adjusting the packet transmission order in the relay, the outage probability can be decreased in the proposed transmission scheme. Both theoretical analyses and simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms traditional ones by a significant margin of 2-4 dB gain in terms of outage probability.