Buffer-Aided Relaying Approaches for Multicast Communications

This paper proposes and compares different policies to perform the optimal link selection in the presence of bufferaided relay for multicast communications. These policies are based on the knowledge of the instantaneous link quality indicators as well as the status of the relay buffer, and dynamically select the more suited link according to a deterministic or random criterion, whose parameters are optimized via a Markov chain theoretical framework. The performance for all the proposed methods are analytically derived and validated through intensive computer simulations for different multicast scenarios. The advantages of the proposed schemes are pointed out in terms of multicast throughput, buffer occupancy for different buffer size and multicast group size.