Iterative Receiver Processing for OFDM Modulated Physical-Layer Network Coding in Underwater Acoustic Channels

Physical-layer network coding (PLNC) allows two remote terminals to exchange information in two time slots via a half-duplex relay. In this paper, we consider PLNC in underwater acoustic (UWA) two-way relay networks, with particular attention on the recovery of the network-coded codeword at the relay. Considering multiple paths in UWA channels with large delay spreads and temporal variations, orthogonal-frequency division-multiplexing (OFDM) is used as an underlying modulation. Distinct from existing works which mainly focus on the flat-fading channel and the non-iterative PLNC decoding, we investigate three iterative receivers at the relay in doubly-selective UWA channels. To estimate the network-coded codeword, the three receivers respectively adopt i) a conventional decoding scheme to recover the codewords from two terminals independently; ii) a decoding scheme to recover the network-coded codeword directly, and iii) a joint decoding scheme to recover a composite codeword formed by the codewords from the two terminals. In the time-varying channel, the intercarrier interference (ICI) in the received signal has been explicitly addressed in three receivers. Extensive simulations and experimental results reveal that the decoding scheme for direct recovery of the network-coded codeword cannot work well in the multipath channel, and that with a lower complexity the performance of the iterative separate-decoding scheme can catch up with that of the joint decoding scheme.