Design of Link-Selection Strategies for Buffer-Aided DCSK-SWIPT Relay System

Adaptive link selection for buffer-aided relaying can achieve significant performance gain compared with the conventional relaying with fixed transmission criterion. However, most of the existing link-selection strategies are designed based on perfect channel state information (CSI), which are very complex by requiring channel estimator. To solve this issue, in this paper, we investigate a buffer-aided differential chaos-shift-keying based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (DCSK-SWIPT) relay system, where a decode-and-forward protocol is considered and the relay is equipped with a data buffer and an energy buffer. In particular, we propose two link-selection protocols for the proposed system based on harvested energy, data-buffer status and energy-shortage status, where the CSI is replaced by the harvested energy to avoid the channel estimation and the practical problem of the decoding cost at the relay is considered. Furthermore, the bit-error-rate (BER) and average-delay closed-form expressions of the proposed protocols are derived over multipath Rayleigh fading channels, which are validated via simulations. Finally, results demonstrate that both the proposed protocols not only provide better BER performance than the conventional DCSK system and DCSK-SWIPT relay system but also achieve better BER performance and lower average delay in comparison to the conventional signal-to-noise-ratio-based buffer-aided DCSK-SWIPT relay systems.