Achieving full cooperative and frequency diversity in bit-interleaved coded two-way relay networks

This paper investigates channel coded transmission schemes for two-way relay networks (TWRNs) where two terminal nodes exchange information through a set of amplify-and-forward (AF) relays over frequency-selective fading channels. Specifically, we assume that the two terminal nodes employ bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) for coded data transmission, while the relays employ distributed space-time coding (DSTC) for forwarding the received signals. Our main contribution lies in analyzing the achievable diversity order of such channel coded AF-TWRNs. We show that the two terminal nodes, by using a maximum-likelihood (ML) BICM-OFDM decoder, can harvest the full cooperative and frequency diversity. Simulation results are presented to verify our analytical results.