  In this paper we consider a simple cooperative network consisting of a
source, a destination and a cluster of decode-and-forward half-duplex relays.
At each time-slot, the source and (possibly) one of the relays transmit a
packet to another relay and the destination, respectively, resulting in
inter-relay interference (IRI). In this work, with the aid of buffers at the
relays, we mitigate the detrimental effect of IRI through interference
cancellation. More specifically, we propose the min-power scheme that minimizes
the total energy expenditure per time slot under an IRI cancellation scheme.
Apart from minimizing the energy expenditure, the min-power selection scheme,
also provides better throughput and lower outage probability than existing
works in the literature. It is the first time that interference cancellation is
combined with buffer-aided relays and power adaptation to mitigate the IRI and
minimize the energy expenditure. The new relay selection policy is analyzed in
terms of outage probability and diversity, by modeling the evolution of the
relay buffers as a Markov Chain (MC). We construct the state transition matrix
of the MC, and hence obtain the steady state with which we can characterize the
outage probability. The proposed scheme outperforms relevant state-of-the-art
relay selection schemes in terms of throughput, diversity and energy
efficiency, as demonstrated via examples.
