Novel multihop transmission schemes using selective network coding and differential modulation for two-way relay networks

In this paper, we propose a novel multihop transmission scheme using selective network coding (NC) and differential modulation (SNC-DM) for two-way relay networks (TWRNs) when neither the source nodes nor the relay nodes know the channel state information (CSI). We first develop a bidirectional transmission scheme using NC where the information exchange in a two-way multihop relay network with the arbitrary number of hops can be completed in four transmission phases. As a result, the maximum achievable throughput does not decrease as the number of hops increases. To overcome the error propagation in the multihop transmission with decode-and-forward (DF) protocol in wireless fading channels, a selective NC scheme is proposed. In addition, we apply differential modulation in the proposed scheme to avoid channel estimation in the multihop networks. The performance of the proposed scheme is analyzed, and a closed-form frame error rate (FER) expression is derived. It is shown that the proposed scheme achieves significant improvements in both FER performance and network throughput compared to the conventional multihop DF scheme in TWRNs. The analytical results are verified through numerical simulations.