Modulation Scheme for Network-coded Bi-directional Relaying over an Asymmetric Channel

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a modulation scheme for a network-coded bi-directional relaying (NBR) system over an asymmetric channel, which means that the qualities of the relay channel (the link between the BS and RS) and access channel (the link between the RS and MS) are not identical. The proposed scheme employs a dual constellation in such a way that the RS broadcasts the network-coded symbols modulated by two different constellations to the MS and BS over two consecutive transmission intervals. We derive an upper bound on the average bit error rate (BER) of the proposed scheme, and compare it with the hybrid constellation-based modulation scheme proposed for the asymmetric bi-directional link. Furthermore, we investigate the channel utilization of the existing bi-directional relaying schemes as well as the NBR system with the proposed dual constellation diversity-based modulation (DCD). From our simulation results, we show that the DCD gives better average BER performance about 3.5~4dB when Eb/N0 is equal to 10 -2 , while maintaining the same spectral efficiency as the existing NBR schemes over the asymmetric bi-directional relaying channel.