The growing demand for high-speed data, quality of service (QoS) assurance, and energy efficiency has triggered the evolution of fourth-generation (4G) Long-Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) networks to fifth generation (5G) and beyond. Interference is still a major performance bottleneck. This paper studies the application of physical-layer network coding (PNC), which is a technique that exploits interference, in heterogeneous cellular networks. In particular, we propose a rate-maximizing relay selection algorithm for a single cell with multiple relays assuming the decode-and-forward (DF) strategy. With nodes transmitting at different powers, the proposed algorithm adapts the resource allocation according to the differing link rates, and we prove theoretically that the optimization problem is log-concave. The proposed technique is shown to perform significantly better than the widely studied selection-cooperation technique. We then undertake an experimental study—on a software radio platform—of the decoding performance of PNC with unbalanced signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in the multiple-access transmissions. This problem is inherent in cellular networks, and it is shown that, with channel coding and decoders based on multiuser detection and successive interference cancellation, the performance is better with power imbalance. This paper paves the way for further research on multicell PNC, resource allocation, and the implementation of PNC with higher order modulations and advanced coding techniques.
We study relay selection with the physical-layer network coding (PNC), which is a major decode-and-forward (DF)-based bidirectional protocol. We consider a network consists of two different end-sources and multiple relays, where each relay adopts XOR-encoding to combine two received symbols from the two end-sources. For this network, we propose a relay selection scheme by modifying the well-known selection cooperation (SC) to use in the PNC protocol, and it is referred to as SC-PNC. The SC-PNC consists of two phases: a multiple access channel (MAC) phase and a broadcast channel (BC) phase. In the MAC phase, a set of relays that correctly decode two received symbols from the two end-sources is determined; in the BC phase, among the relays in the determined set, a single best relay is selected such that the minimum mutual information of the two links from each relay to the two end-sources is maximized. Finally, we derive the exact outage probability of the SC-PNC in closed-form.