Wireless networks performance enhancement via buffered cooperative communications

Abstract

The next-generation wireless communication network is expected to provide a significant increase in average throughput, radio resource utilisation as well as reduced call blocking probability for edge-cell user equipments (UEs). Satisfying these goals has remained as a Herculean task to wireless network designers and operators. The cooperative communication has been proposed by researchers as a possible technique to surmount these challenges. This study addresses the problems of enhancing the network performance of cell-edge UEs in wireless communication networks. A Buffered Cooperative Communication (BCC) model that exploits the transmission channel qualities using link adaptation to enhance the average throughput, quality of service and radio resource utilisation is proposed. In the proposed BCC model, the Markov chain analysis is used to investigate the effect of the queue buffer size on the average throughput, data blocking probability and radio resource utilisation. Finally, this work provides a framework to investigate the performance of the BCC scheme compared to the benchmark: non-BCC (NBCC) scheme. The simulation results show the proposed BCC scheme has significant improvements in the performance over the NBCC scheme.