  In this paper, a cooperative protocol is investigated for a multi-hop network
consisting of relays with buffers of finite size, which may operate in
different communication modes. The protocol is based on the myopic
decode-and-forward strategy, where each node of the network cooperates with a
limited number of neighboring nodes for the transmission of the signals. Each
relay stores in its buffer the messages that were successfully decoded, in
order to forward them through the appropriate channel links, based on its
supported communication modes. A complete theoretical framework is investigated
that models the evolution of the buffers and the transitions at the operations
of each relay as a state Markov chain (MC). We analyze the performance of the
proposed protocol in terms of outage probability and derive an expression for
the achieved diversity-multiplexing tradeoff, by using the state transition
matrix and the related steady state of the MC. Our results show that the
proposed protocol outperforms the conventional multi-hop relaying scheme and
the system's outage probability as well as the achieved diversity order depend
on the degree of cooperation among neighboring nodes and the communication
model that is considered for every relay of the network.
