Channel estimation based on outage probability in analog network coding

Network coding is an emerging technique of packet forwarding that encodes the packets at a relay node in the network layer. Analog network coding (ANC) encodes the packets by superposing signals at the physical layer, which can further bring throughput improvements. While most previous literatures assume either channel parameters are pre-established or perfect global channel state information (CSI) can be obtained by the relay node, which is unrealistic for a wireless network. In this paper, we propose a scheme to estimate channel gains based on outage probability by varying the sampling window in a multi-user two-way relay network, and present a sum rate optimization opportunistic scheduling scheme as an application of the channel estimation scheme. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our estimation scheme, and the proposed scheduling scheme outperforms the conventional round robin scheduling scheme significantly.