Stability and performance issues of a relay assisted multiple access scheme with MPR capabilities

In this work, we study the impact of a relay node to a network with a finite number of users-sources and a destination node. We assume that the users have saturated queues and the relay node does not have packets of its own; we have random access of the medium and the time is slotted. The relay node stores a source packet that it receives successfully in its queue when the transmission to the destination node has failed. The relay and the destination nodes have multi-packet reception capabilities. We obtain analytical equations for the characteristics of the relay´s queue such as average queue length, stability conditions etc. We also study the throughput per user and the aggregate throughput for the network.