Optimal links selection procedure in buffer‐aided relaying for point‐to‐multipoints communications

Abstract

The increasing diffusion of smart devices has triggered new Internet of Things (IoT) applications, where communications patterns are often in an autonomous mode. Key enabling technologies, such as relaying communications, cell size reduction and multicast communications have been identified to bring the next-generation IoT to a complete fruition. In particular, the use of relay nodes is expected to be useful for coverage and capacity improvements, as well as to support point-to-multipoint services for data disseminating to subscribers communities. To this end, this study proposes a dynamic quorum links selection (DQm) procedure to optimise the throughput for the case of buffer-aided relaying multicast communications. A theoretical analysis based on the Markov chain framework is provided and validated through simulation results in terms of multicast throughput and relay buffer occupancy for different sizes of the multicast group. The advantages of the proposed DQm procedure have been highlighted by comparing the achieved performance with respect to classical conventional relay scheme. Finally, a protocol for channel state estimation is presented and the impact of the requested overhead on the performance of DQm procedure is shown.