Performance analysis of multi-hop diversity aided multi-hop links

Abstract

A multi-hop transmission scheme is proposed and studied, where all the relay nodes (RNs) of a multi-hop link (MHL) are assumed to have buffers for temporarily storing their received packets. Hence, the RNs are operated under the so-called store-and-forward (SF) relaying scheme. As a benefit of storing packets at the RNs, during each time-slot (TS), the best hop typically has the highest signal to-noise ratio (SNR), which can be selected from the set of those hops that have packets awaiting transmission in the buffer.A packet is then transmitted over the best hop. This hop-selection procedure is reminiscent of selection (SC) diversity, which is referred to here as multi-hop diversity (MHD). In this paper, we investigate both the bit error and outage probability as well as the delay performance of the MHD scheme, when assuming that each hop experiences both propagation pathloss and independent identically distributed (i.i.d) flat Rayleigh fading. The MAC layer implementation and several closed-form formulas are derived. Both numerical and simulation results are provided for characterizing the achievable performance of the MHD scheme. Our performance results show that relying on multiple hops has the potential of providing a significant diversity gain, which may be exploited for enhancing the reliability of wireless multi-hop communications.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Lie-Liang Yang: orcid.org/0000-0002-2032-9327

ORCID for Lajos Hanzo: orcid.org/0000-0002-2636-5214

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