Virtual full-duplex buffer-aided relaying — Relay selection and beamforming

Abstract

In this paper, we study virtual full-duplex (FD) buffer-aided relaying to recover the multiplexing loss of half-duplex (HD) relaying in a network with multiple buffer-aided relays, each of which has multiple antennas, through opportunistic relay selection and beamforming. The main idea of virtual FD buffer-aided relaying is that a source and a relay simultaneously transmit their own information to another relay and a destination, respectively. In this network, inter-relay interference (IRI) is a crucial problem which has to be resolved like self-interference in the FD relaying. In contrast to previous work that neglected the IRI, we propose two buffer-aided relay selection and beam-forming schemes taking the IRI into consideration. Numerical results show that our proposed relay selection scheme with zero-forcing beamforming (ZFB)-based IRI cancellation approaches the average end-to-end capacity of IRI-free upper bound as the numbers of relays and antennas increase.