Statistical Delay Tradeoffs in Buffer-Aided Two-Hop Wireless Communication Systems

This paper analyzes the impact of statistical delay constraints on the achievable rate of a two-hop wireless communication link in which the communication between a source and a destination is accomplished via a buffer-aided relay node. It is assumed that there is no direct link between the source and the destination, and the buffer-aided relay forwards the information to the destination by employing the decode-and-forward scheme. Given statistical delay constraints specified via maximum delay and delay violation probability, the tradeoff between the statistical delay constraints imposed on any two concatenated queues is identified. With this characterization, the maximum constant arrival rates that can be supported by this two-hop link are obtained by determining the effective capacity of such links as a function of the statistical delay constraints, signal-to-noise ratios at the source and relay, and the fading distributions of the links. It is shown that asymmetric statistical delay constraints at the buffers of the source and relay node can improve the achievable rate. Overall, the impact of the statistical delay tradeoff on the achievable throughput is provided.