Optimal Design of Probabilistic Slot Allocation for Multiple-Sensor Relaying Networks

The aim of this paper is to design a bandwidth-efficient multiuser network. We consider a wireless sensor network where a relay helps multiple source-destination pairs which require a minimum data rate. The relay helps communication pairs in probabilistic manner during relaying slots. In the proposed scheme, the relay does not need orthogonal channels (time slots) as many as the number of source-destination pairs but the channels are shared by the relay with some probability. We optimize the slot-sharing ratio to maximize the expected sum rate while guaranteeing the minimum rate for a given number of relaying slots. Numerical examples show that the proposed relaying scheme improves the expected data rate even though the number of relaying slots is less than the number of source-destination pairs.