Abstract-In this paper we consider a simple cooperative network consisting of a source, a destination and a cluster of decode-and-forward relays characterized by the half-duplex constraint. At each time-slot the source and (possibly) one of the relays transmit a packet to another relay and the destination, respectively. When the source and a relay transmit simultaneously, inter-relay interference is introduced at the receiving relay. In this work, with the aid of buffers at the relays, we mitigate the detrimental effect of inter-relay interference through either interference cancellation or mitigation. More specifically, we propose the min − power opportunistic relaying protocol that minimizes the total energy expenditure per time slot under an inter-relay interference cancellation scheme. The min − power relay-pair selection scheme, apart from minimizing the energy expenditure, also provides better throughput and lower outage probability than existing works in the literature. The performance of the proposed scheme is demonstrated via illustrative examples and simulations in terms of outage probability and average throughput.
I. INTRODUCTIONRelaying cooperation is an efficient technique to combat fading and path-loss effects in wireless systems. It enables multiple nodes to create virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configurations in order to provide transmit and/or receive spatial diversity to single-antenna destinations [1]. Traditional cooperative systems are characterized by the halfduplex constraint and thus relay nodes cannot receive and transmit data simultaneously resulting in bandwidth loss. In order to overcome this limitation, several techniques have been proposed in the literature [2]. Among them, the successive relaying scheme in [3] incorporates two relays and proposes a transmission overlap (source-relay (SR), relay-destination (RD)) which mimics full-duplex transmission. On the other hand, for networks with multiple relay nodes, relay selection has been introduced as a promising solution that exploits the available channel diversity degrees by keeping the implementation complexity low. In earlier works, relays were assumed to lack data buffers and selection was based on the maxmin criterion and its variations (see, for example, [4]-[6] and references therein). As a result, the relay that received the