Buffering in a Three-Node Relay Network

This paper explores two buffering relay models to improve the capacity of relay networks in slow fading environments. Throughput, average packet delay, and information loss are considered as functions of buffer size and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It is shown that, for any fading statistics, both a fixed buffering relay model and a dynamic buffering relay model offer significant performance advantages in terms of capacity over existing methods at the expense of increased delay. It is also seen that, of the two models, dynamic buffering provides a smaller average delay.