Relay Selection for Full-Duplex Buffer-Aided Relaying

In this paper, we consider buffer-aided (BA) relaying with full-duplex (FD) relays. The ability of the FD relays to simultaneously transmit and receive offers new degrees of freedom in the design of BA relay selection strategies. We take this feature into consideration to propose two novel FD BA relay selection schemes. A Markov chain analysis is presented to evaluate the outage probabilities (OP) and average packet delays (APD) of the proposed schemes over generalized kappa -mu fading channels. Through an asymptotic analysis, we derive closed-form expressions of the asymptotic OP and APD. This analysis highlights on the impact of the buffer size, number of relays and network architecture on the system performance and allows to draw conclusions on the most suitable scheme to apply in each network setup. Results demonstrate significant performance gains compared to the state-of-the-art half-duplex (HD) BA relaying schemes. In particular, the first proposed scheme is appealing since it minimizes the OP when the relays are closer to the destination while the second scheme achieves an asymptotic APD value of one in this scenario. This highlights on the advantages of FD BA relaying since none of the existing HD BA relaying strategies can achieve an APD below two.