Performance of Buffer-Aided Adaptive Modulation in Multihop Communications

In multihop diversity (MHD) aided multihop links, the nodes are assumed to have buffers for temporarily storing their received packets for further transmission at instances of good channel quality. Since adaptive modulation is employed, the number of packets in each time slot (TS) is affected both by the channel quality and the buffer fullness. During each time-slot (TS), the criterion used for activating a specific hop is that of transmitting the highest number of packets. When more than one hop is capable of transmitting the same number of packets, the particular hop having the highest channel quality (reliability) is activated. Hence, we refer to this regime as the maximum throughput adaptive rate transmission (MTART) scheme. The bit error ratio (BER), the outage probability, the throughput as well as the bandwidth-efficiency of the MTART scheme is analyzed. Our results demonstrate that our MTART regime has the potential of significantly outperforming conventional adaptive modulation. Naturally, the BER is improved by the buffering scheme advocated at the cost of an increased delay. Hence, the distribution of the end-to-end packet delay will also be characterized.