Iterative decoding and detection for physical layer network coding

Abstract

Wireless networks comprising multiple relays are very common and it is important that all users are able to exchange messages via relays in the shortest possible time. A promising technique to achieve this is physical layer network coding (PNC), where the time taken to exchange messages between users is achieved by exploiting the interference at the relay due to the multiple incoming signals from the users. At the relay, the interference is demapped to a binary sequence representing the exclusive-OR of both users’ messages. The time to exchange messages is reduced because the relay broadcasts the network coded message to both users, who can then acquire the desired message by applying the exclusive-OR of their original message with the network coded message. However, although PNC can increase throughput it is at the expense of performance degradation due to errors resulting from the demapping of the interference to bits. A number of papers in the literature have investigated PNC with an iterative channel coding scheme in order to improve performance. However, in this thesis the performance of PNC is investigated for end-to-end (E2E) the three most common iterative coding schemes: turbo codes, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and trellis bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID). It is well known that in most scenarios turbo and LDPC codes perform similarly and can achieve near-Shannon limit performance, whereas BICM-ID does not perform quite as well but has a lower complexity. However, the results in this thesis show that on a two-way relay channel (TWRC) employing PNC, LDPC codes do not perform well and BICM-ID actually outperforms them while also performing comparably with turbo codes. Also presented in this thesis is an extrinsic information transfer (ExIT) chart analysis of the iterative decoders for each coding scheme, which is used to explain this surprising result. Another problem arising from the use of PNC is the transfer of reliable information from the received signal at the relay to the destination nodes. The demapping of the interference to binary bits means that reliability information about the received signal is lost and this results in a significant degradation in performance when applying soft-decision decoding at the destination nodes. This thesis proposes the use of traditional angle modulation (frequency modulation (FM) and phase modulation (PM)) when broadcasting from the relay, where the real and imaginary parts of the complex received symbols at the relay modulate the frequency or phase of a carrier signal, while maintaining a constant envelope. This is important since the complex received values at the relay are more likely to be centred around zero and it undesirable to transmit long sequences of low values due to potential synchronisation problems at the destination nodes. Furthermore, the complex received values, obtained after angle demodulation, are used to derive more reliable log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) of the received symbols at the destination nodes and consequently improve the performance of the iterative decoders for each coding scheme compared with conventionally coded PNC. This thesis makes several important contributions: investigating the performance of different iterative channel coding schemes combined with PNC, presenting an analysis of the behaviour of different iterative decoding algorithms when PNC is employed using ExIT charts, and proposing the use of angle modulation at the relay to transfer reliable information to the destination nodes to improve the performance of the iterative decoding algorithms. The results from this thesis will also be useful for future research projects in the areas of PNC that are currently being addressed, such as synchronisation techniques and receiver design.