Hybrid AF and DF with network coding for wireless Two Way Relay Networks

Recently network coding has been significantly considered in wireless Two-Way Relay Networks (TWRN) because of its ability of improving the network throughput. In traditional designs, if the input packets from two source nodes cannot be simultaneously decoded correctly, normally only the correct one is forwarded. In this paper, we propose a hybrid amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) scheme with network coding for TWRN, which is referred to as HADF-NC, where the relay node can AF the network coded information even when one of the packets from the two source nodes cannot be correctly decoded. Simulation results show that the proposed HADF-NC scheme can achieve higher diversity gain than the traditional network coding (TNC) based two-way relay scheme in block fading channels. We also analyze the outage probability of the proposed HADF-NC scheme and compare it to that of the TNC scheme for TWRN in slow fading channels.