A hybrid TDMA-MAC cooperative relaying scheme: Stability and delay analysis

We consider a cooperative relaying system with any number of source terminals, one shared relay, and a common destination. We assume a slotted time division multiple access (TDMA) framework in which each source terminal is allocated a fraction of the time. We propose a novel hybrid cooperative scheme for the described network. In contrast to former works which assume that the relay only transmits in the idle time slots, we assume that the relay can, simultaneously, transmit with the source terminals via multi-access channel (MAC). In the hybrid cooperative scheme, the relay operates in two modes each with a certain probability; the TDMA mode and the MAC mode. We derive expressions for the stability conditions and the average delay for all the queues in the network. We design the probability of each relaying mode such that the stable throughput is maximized while the network queues are stable. The problem is formulated as a non-convex quadratic constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) optimization problem. Numerical results reveal that the hybrid cooperative scheme significantly enhances the performance of the network in terms of stability region, average delay, and spectral efficiency. © 2016 IEEE.