Multisource buffer-aided relay networks: Adaptive rate transmission

In this paper, we consider a multisource multirelay network where relays employ buffers to store the received user data packets before forwarding them to a common destination. The transmission schedule, i.e., when each source and each relay transmit, is not a priori fixed, but rather depends on the link qualities. In particular, we consider adaptive link selection and adaptive rate transmission for the considered network. For simple three node relay networks, it was shown before that buffer-aided relaying with adaptive link selection yields significant throughput gains compared to conventional relaying protocols using a fixed transmission schedule. In this work, we consider a general multisource multirelay framework where operations are more complex and analysis is more involved. First, we consider average sum rate maximization for adaptive rate transmission and derive an adaptive link selection policy which exploits the channel state information. As fairness is an important issue in multisource networks, we also consider max-min fairness constrained throughput optimization and derive the corresponding link selection policy. Numerical results show that the proposed link selection policies yield significantly higher throughputs compared to conventional relaying schemes where source and relay transmission schedules are a-priori fixed.