Throughput improvement and its tradeoff with the queuing delay in the diamond relay networks.

Diamond relay network model, as a basic transmission model, has recently been attracting considerable attention in wireless ad hoc networks. Node cooperation and opportunistic scheduling scheme are two important techniques to improve the performance in wireless scenarios. In the paper we consider such a problem how to efficiently combine opportunistic scheduling and cooperative modes for the Rayleigh fading scenario in the diamond relay network. To do so, we first compare the throughput of SRP (Spatial Reused Pattern) and AFP (Amplify Forwarding Pattern) in the half-duplex case with the assumption that channel side information is known to all and then come up with a new scheduling scheme. It will be verified that only switching between SRP and AFP simply does little help to obtain an expected improvement because SRP is always superior to AFP on average due to its efficient spatial reuse. To improve the throughput further, we put forward a new processing strategy in which buffers are employed at both relays in SRP mode. By efficiently utilizing the links with relatively higher gains, the throughput can be greatly improved at a cost of queuing delay. Furthermore, we shall quantitatively evaluate the queuing delay and the tradeoff between the throughput and the additional queuing delay. Finally, to realize our developed strategy and make sure it always run at stable status, we present two criteria and an algorithm on the selection and adjustment of the switching thresholds. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]