Consensus Testing via Relay Networks by Physical-Layer Network Coding

In this paper, the authors show that using physical layer network coding (PNC) in wireless relay systems does not always increase throughput performance, and to achieve maximum throughput, PNC should be exploited intelligently regarding to the channel conditions. In this study, they propose a selective PNC (SPNC) scheme in bidirectional relay systems for binary phase shift keying. In the proposed scheme, the relay chooses either to detect network-coded data from superimposed signal by PNC scheme or single source data by a so-called single node detection (SND) scheme, based on which offers more end-to-end throughput for current channel realisation. They analytically determine the region of channel state plane in which SPNC selects SND scheme. Also, they obtain expressions for instantaneous bit error rates (BERs) of PNC and SND protocols. Moreover, they derive upper bounds in closed-form for average BERs of PNC and SND schemes during multiple access phase at the relay. Then, they investigate SPNC with high-order modulations. Simulations and analytical results confirm that SPNC achieves considerable throughput gain over PNC in Rayleigh fading channels.

This chapter considers a two‐way relay network, where two terminals A and B desire to exchange information with the help of a relay R. It considers the application of physical‐layer network coding (PLNC) in underwater acoustic systems. With orthogonal frequency‐division multiplexing (OFDM) as the underlying modulation scheme, the chapter presents the receiver design at the relay node in the presence of underwater acoustic time‐varying multipath channels. It introduces the system model for the OFDM‐modulated PLNC at the relay node. The chapter derives outage performance bounds of the relay operation in a time‐invariant multipath channel. Performance results based on simulated and emulated data are presented. The data collected in the SPACE08 experiment are used to test the three iterative receivers. The data sets collected in a two‐input multiple‐output (TIMO) experimental setting are adopted to emulate a two‐way relay system. The chapter also demonstrates the block‐error‐rate performance of two decoding schemes.

In this article, we investigate the resilience of Massive MIMO Physical Layer Network Coding (PNC) to jamming attack in both sub-6 GHz and millimeter-Wave (mmWave) systems in vehicular networks. Massive MIMO generally is resilient to jamming attacks, and we investigate the impact that PNC has on this resilience, if combined with Massive MIMO. The combination of Massive MIMO and PNC has shown a significant improvement in the bit error rate (BER) in our previous investigation. The corresponding framework is analysed against a barraging attack from a jammer, where the jamming channel is not known to the base station (BS), and the jammer can use any number of transmit antennas. Over Rayleigh channel, our simulation results reveal that Massive MIMO PNC performs better in the lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions to jamming attacks and this is achieved at twice the spectral efficiency. A similar performance is observed over mmWave channel.

Adaptive physical layer network coding (PNC) has been shown to be effective in two-way relay communications (TWRC). Given that the existing PNC methods were developed for frequency-flat fading channels, this paper studies adaptive PNC in OFDM systems operating over frequency-selective fading channels. Proposed and investigated are three methods to determine a common clustering for all subcarriers in order to reduce the overhead information required in the broadcast phase. The "Min-SER" method is given based on the analysis of the error event in the multiple access phase, while the "Max-fade-SER" and "Min-fade-distance" methods are recommended to further reduce the computational complexity in determining the common clustering. Considering the trade-off among performance, overhead and complexity, the "Max-fade-SER" method is the most attractive clustering method for applying adaptive PNC in OFDM systems.

Physical layer network coding (PNC) has the potential to improve the spectral efficiency of wireless relay communications by utilising the superposition of signal propagation. In the ideal case, PNC can double the throughput of a symmetric relay network when compared to conventional time division multiplexing. However, in practice imperfect channel conditions and hardware can lead to time and frequency offsets at the relay receiver that degrade PNC performance.

In this paper, a physical-layer network coding (PNC) method is offered for a two-way relay network with spatial modulation (SM) for source node and relay node. For this purpose, we consider a two-way relay network consists of a single relay node and two source nodes both equipped with multiple antennas. It includes two source nods for transferring the data through SM and also, the relay node for decrypting coded packet network (through the XOR) of two packets received from the source node. In the proposed method, the signal detection approach with maximum-likelihood for the PNC with SM modulation is used for relay nodes. The simulation results show that the bit error rate (BER) in the relay node of the proposed method is significantly improved compared to the conventional method PNC; while the data rate is based on the same BER. It is worth mentioning that the performance of the proposed method, when the number of antenna nodes rises, is significant. And it leads to increase in the data rate which indicates that the proposed method will be much convenient for the next generation of wireless communication systems, especially the fifth generation. It should also be said that the suggested SM-based PNC method, does not need channel state information at transmitter. So it can be easily implemented in practice.

This paper investigates noncoherent detection in a two-way relay channel operated with physical- layer network coding (PNC), assuming FSK modulation and short-packet transmissions. For noncoherent detection, the detector has access to the magnitude but not the phase of the received signal. For conventional communication in which a receiver receives the signal from a transmitter only, the phase does not affect the magnitude, hence the performance of the noncoherent detector is independent of the phase. PNC, on the other hand, is a multiuser system in which a receiver receives signals from multiple transmitters simultaneously. The relative phase of the signals from different transmitters affects the received signal magnitude through constructive-destructive interference. In particular, for good performance, the noncoherent detector of a multiuser system such as PNC must take into account the influence of the relative phase on the signal magnitude. Building on this observation, this paper delves into the fundamentals of PNC noncoherent detector design. To avoid excessive overhead, we assume a set-up in which the short packets in the PNC system do not have preambles. We show how the relative phase can be deduced directly from the magnitudes of the received data symbols, and that the knowledge of the relative phase thus deduced can in turn be used to enhance performance of noncoherent detection. We design a noncoherent detector that jointly estimates relative phase and detects data using a belief propagation algorithm. Numerical results show that our detector performs as well as a "fictitious" optimal detector that has perfect knowledge of the relative phase. Although this paper focuses on PNC with FSK modulation, we believe the insight of this paper applies generally to noncoherent detection in other multiuser systems with other modulations. Specifically, our insight is that the relative phase of overlapped signals affects the signal magnitude in multiuser systems, but fortunately the relative phase can be deduced from the magnitudes and this knowledge can be used to improve detection performance.

In this paper, Physical Layer Network Coding (PLNC) based bidirectional Decode and Forward (DF) relay network is proposed using Spatial Modulated Full Duplex (SMFD) nodes. In the proposed network, the source nodes exchange two bits of information in single time slot. The Most Significant Bit (MSB) of the data symbol is used for transmit antenna selection and LSB is transmitted by the selected transmit antenna. The self-interference at the SMFD nodes are modeled as Gaussian and its variance is based on thermal noise power. Analytical expressions are derived for upper and lower bound end-to-end outage probabilities of the proposed network in Rayleigh fading environment. The outage performance of the proposed network is better than the conventional PLNC based bidirectional full duplex (CFD) relay networks.

Link layer network coding (LLNC) promises to provide high throughput in relay networks through combining packets at the relays and trading communication for computation. The emerging area of physical layer network coding (PLNC) exploits the electromagnetic nature of signals and eliminates the need for addition at the packet level, while making signal design and coding schemes adaptable to the channel conditions. Although network coding has been extensively studied recently, physical layer network coding has not received the attention it deserves. Several recent works introduced the pollution attack at the network layer; however, the network performance at the physical layer with pollution attacks has not been evaluated before. The main challenge with the pollution attack involves propagation of the corrupted packets in an epidemic manner, which degrades performance of the network. As PLNC schemes boost up the network throughput, a thorough study evaluating this superiority to the LLNC scheme in presence of an intruder is necessary. The robustness of both schemes towards an attack have been studied in this article.

In linear networks with physical layer network coding (PNC), the relay node performs the combination of the relaying data from both end users. Moreover, the adaptive power allocation (APA) scheme can optimize the transmission rate of PNC for relaying communication systems. However, when the relay nodes are deployed with different distance to both of end user nodes, it is called near-far effect (NFE). The NFE degrades the bit error rate (BER) performance with deteriorating the decoding performance of PNC. Therefore, in order to further optimize the transmission power allocation (PA) for both of end user nodes and relaying node we propose a total adaptive power allocation (TAPA) scheme in this paper. With the proposed TAPA scheme, the NFE of conventional PNC systems can be diminished and the BER performance is improved. Simulation results show that the proposed TAPA improves the BER performance especially for the severe NFE environments.

This paper applies the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to address the problem of joint channel estimation and channel decoding in Physical-layer Network Coding (PNC) systems. The use of PNC can significantly improve the throughput of a relay network. The throughput advantage, however, is predicated on the availability of accurate channel estimates. For channel-coded PNC systems, a major challenge is that the maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) channel estimation is nontrivial due to 1) the overlapping of signals from multiple users received at the relay; and 2) the correlations among data symbols introduced by channel coding. In this paper, we show that an EM algorithm implemented on a factor graph framework is well suited to tackle this problem. Through iterative message passing, the channel estimation component and the channel decoding component in the factor graph interact to improve each other's results progressively. Simulation results indicate that just one EM iteration of our algorithm can significantly improve the channel estimation accuracy as well as the BER performance of channel-coded PNC systems.

A noncoherent two-way relaying system is developed using physical-layer network coding for improved throughput over conventional relaying in a fading channel. Energy-efficient noncoherent operation is achieved using multitone frequency shift keying (FSK). A novel soft-output demodulator is developed for the relay, and corresponding achievable exchange rates are found for Rayleigh fading and AWGN channels. Bit-error rate performance approaching the achievable rate is realized using a capacity-approaching channel code and a receiver architecture, which iterates between demodulation and channel decoding. Iterative decoding is performed feeding information back from the channel decoder to the demodulator. In addition, the error-rate performance is made to approach the achievable rate more closely by optimizing LDPC codes for this system. The energy efficiency improvement obtained by increasing the modulation order is more dramatic for the proposed physical-layer network coding scheme than it is for a conventional point-to-point system. Using optimized LDPC codes, the bit-error rate performance is improved by as much as 1.1 dB over a widely known standardized LDPC code, and comes to within 0.7 dB of the limit corresponding to the achievable rate. Throughout this paper, the performance for physical-layer network coding is compared with conventional network coding. When noncoherent FSK is used, physical-layer network coding enables higher achievable rates, and conventional network coding exhibits better energy efficiency at low rates.

Physical layer network coding (PNC) is a novel technique that allows two users to exchange messages in a wireless network. PNC takes place at a relay node and exploits the interference caused by incoming signals from the two users to increase throughput. In this paper, the performance of a two-way relay network employing PNC is evaluated with three types of error-correcting codes used at the source and destination nodes, namely low-density parity-check codes, turbo codes and bit-interleaved coded modulation with iterative decoding (BICM-ID). All three coding schemes perform similarly in a single user system on the AWGN channel with no relay, but results obtained when employing PNC show that although there is an overall degradation in their performance of all three codes, the LDPC code performance is more seriously affected due to the Sum-Product decoding algorithm being less robust to unreliable symbols broadcast from the relay.

In this paper, we investigate the throughput capacity of large-scale wireless networks, in which three network-assisted coding schemes are considered: (1) multi-point-to-point coding (MPPC); (2) MPPC based network coding (NC); and (3) MPPC based physical-layer network coding (PLNC). This study is based on the generalized physical model, in which the transmission rate depends on the signal to noise and interference ratio (SINR). Such a model has not been used to analyze the behaviors of large-scale wireless networks with the aforementioned coding schemes. To understand the capacity gains of these schemes, we develop constructive lower bounds for one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) networks with size factor w, in which we construct novel wireless highway systems. This study shows that, compared to point-to-point coding (PPC), MPPC can improve the scaling law of network capacity when w exceeds a certain scale. In addition, this study reveals that MPPC based NC and PLNC can improve the capacity by constant factors. Specifically, NC can always obtain a gain of 2 in both 1D and 2D networks. On the other hand, the gain of PLNC can be larger than 2 in 1D networks, and can be up to 2 in 2D networks, depending on w, transmission power, noise, and path-loss of propagation.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of the so-called Cross Network operating under diverse Network Coding (NC) techniques. We study the impact of Medium Access Control (MAC) layer fairness on the throughput performance of the network for the cases of pure relaying, digital NC with and without overhearing and physical layer NC with and without overhearing. We provide a comparison among these techniques and we discuss the throughput bounds, due to MAC layer limitations, imposed to the system operation by broadly adopted short range communication protocols that provide for fair resource allocation such as IEEE 802.11. Furthermore, we show that significant coding gains are achieved with digital and physical layer NC and we discuss on the energy efficiency performance of each NC case when applied on the Cross Network.