Power Control Method for Energy Efficient Buffer-Aided Relay Systems

In this paper, a power control method is proposed for a buffer-aided relay node (RN) to enhance the energy efficiency of the RN system. By virtue of a buffer, the RN can reserve the data at the buffer when the the channel gain between an RN and a destination node (DN) is weaker than that between SN and RN. The RN then opportunistically forward the reserved data in the buffer according to channel condition between the RN and the DN. By exploiting the buffer, RN reduces transmit power when it reduces the transmit data rate and reserve the data in the buffer. Therefore, without any total throughput reduction, the power consumption of RN can be reduced, resulting in the energy efficiency (EE) improvement of the RN system. Furthermore, for the power control, we devise a simple power control method based on a two-dimensional surface fitting model of an optimal transmit power of RN. The proposed RN power control method is readily and locally implementable at the RN, and it can significantly improve EE of the RN compared to the fixed power control method and the spectral efficiency based method as verified by the rigorous numerical results.