Network coded two-way relaying with reduced relay complexity

We consider a two-way relay communication with two time-phases. During the first phase the two source nodes transmit simultaneously to the relay. During the second phase the relay broadcasts to the two source nodes whereas it is only allowed to perform scalar symbol-to-symbol operations. We consider a strategy where the relay forwards an estimate of the multiplication of the two transmitted BPSK-symbols at the source nodes. For this strategy, we design several receiver schemes which support soft-decision channel decoding at the source nodes. Our simulation results show a significantly better performance of the proposed strategy compared to a linear amplification at the relay.