Buffer-Aided Link Selection with Network-Coding in Multi-hop Networks

This paper proposes a novel buffer-aided link selection scheme based on network coding in the multiple-hop relay network. The proposed scheme significantly increases transmission throughput by applying data buffers at the relays to decrease the outage probability and using network coding to increase the data rate. The closed-form expressions of both average throughput and packet delay are successfully derived. The proposed scheme not only has significantly higher throughput than both the traditional and existing buffer-aided max-link schemes but smaller average packet delay than the max-link scheme as well, making it an attractive scheme in practice.