Buffer-Aided Diamond Relay Network With Block Fading and Inter-Relay Interference

A simple diamond half-duplex relay network composed of a source, two decode-and-forward half-duplex relays, and a destination is considered, where a direct link between the source and the destination does not exist. For this network, we study the case of buffer-aided relays, where the relays are equipped with buffers. Each relay can receive data from the source, store it in the buffer, and forward it to the destination, when the channel conditions are advantageous. Thereby, buffering enables adaptive scheduling of the transmissions and receptions over time, which allows the network to exploit the diversity offered by the fading channels. For the considered half-duplex network, four transmission modes are defined based on whether the relay nodes receive or transmit. In this paper, we derive the locally optimal scheduling of the transmission modes over time and investigate the achievable average rate, when the relays are affected by inter-relay interference. Since the proposed buffer-aided transmission policies introduce unbounded delay, we provide a sub-optimal buffer-aided transmission policy with limited delay. Moreover, for inter-relay interference cancellation, we consider two coding schemes with different complexities. In the first scheme, we employ dirty paper coding, which entails a high complexity, whereas in the second scheme, we adopt a low-complexity technique based on successive interference cancellation at the receiving relay nodes and optimal power allocation at the transmitting nodes. Our numerical results show that the proposed protocols, with and without delay constraints, outperform existing protocols for the considered network from the literature.