Relay Grouping to Guarantee Timeliness and Reliability in Wireless Networks

Relaying can increase reliability, range, or throughput. In many cyber-physical systems (CPS), relaying is used to maximize reliability before a given deadline. Since concurrent transmissions are not supported by most CPS, time-division multiple access (TDMA) is typically used. However, a major drawback of relaying in TDMA is that pre-allocated time-slots are wasted if their respective transmitters do not have any correctly received packet to relay. Therefore, in this letter, we propose a novel relay grouping scheme to overcome this drawback. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly enhances the reliability while guaranteeing the deadline for each message.