On the Fundamental Queue Analysis for Relay-assisted Two-stage Communication Networks

In this paper, a two-stage and single-relay queueing communication scheme is investigated. The packet arrivals follow the Poisson distribution, and packets are transmitted on slow Rayleigh fading channels. A N-threshold and gated-service policy is applied at the relay server to facilitate traffic-aware designs, such as potential overall energy savings in wireless networks. The mean waiting time, as a key performance metric, is explicitly derived and related with the queueing and service parameters, including packet arrival rate, relay service threshold and channel statistics. The explicit derivations provide fundamental and critical measurements for two-stage queueing communication system. The analytical formulae match precisely with the simulation results, indicating the validity of theoretical derivations.