Multi-hop Relaying: An End-to-End Delay Analysis

The impact of multi-hopping schemes on the communication latency in a relay channel is studied. The main aim is to characterize conditions under which such schemes decrease the communication latency given a reliability requirement. Both decode-forward (DF) and amplify-forward (AF) with block coding are considered, and are compared with the point-to-point (P2P) scheme which ignores the relay. Latency expressions for the three schemes are derived, and conditions under which DF and AF reduce latency are obtained for high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Interestingly, these conditions are more strict when compared to the conditions under which the same multi-hopping schemes achieve higher long-term (information-theoretic) rates than P2P. It turns out that the relation between the sourcedestination SNR and the harmonic mean of the SNR’s of the channels to and from the relay dictates whether multi-hopping reduces latency or not.