Stability and delay analysis for cooperative relaying with multi-access transmission

We consider a cooperative relaying system with two source terminals, one full duplex relay, and a common destination. Each terminal has a local traffic queue while the relay has two relaying queues to store the relayed source packets. We assume that the source terminals transmit packets in orthogonal frequency bands. In contrast to previous work which assumes a time division multi-access cooperation strategy, we assume that the source terminals and the relay simultaneously transmit their packets to the common destination through a multi-access channel (MAC). A new cooperative MAC scheme for the described network is proposed. We drive an expression for the stable throughput and characterize the stability region of the network. Moreover, the fundamental trade-off between the delay and the stable throughput is studied. Numerical results reveal that the proposed protocol outperforms traditional time division multi-access strategies. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2015.