On the Wireless Powered Buffer-Aided Relay Communication with Imperfect CSI

In this paper, we consider a practical wireless powered buffer-aided relay network, where one relay collects energy from source to assist its data delivery to one remote destination node in the presence of channel estimate error (CEE). The relay is assumed to be provisioned with data buffer and energy storage to store data and the collected energy from source. The stochastic channel estimate error model with realistic estimation variance is employed to characterize the influence of the practical channel estimate error. The throughput maximization problem was formulated to derive the practical buffer-aided relaying scheme with imperfect channel state information (CSI). Our analysis unveils that, by explicitly taking CEE into account, buffer-aided relaying scheme still outperforms the non-buffer-aided relay counterpart with ideal CSI assumption. The notable advantages in terms of the realized end-to-end throughput performance and the robustness against the CEE confirm us that, buffer-aided adaptive relaying design provides us a feasible wireless relaying scheme that can be deployed in practical applications.