Optimal hybrid network coding scheme over two-way relaying

The paper introduces a novel hybrid network coding scheme in a three-node two-way relaying network in a wireless fading environment. The proposed hybrid scheme is featured by an opportunistic mechanism which employs one of the two network coding schemes, namely physical-layer network coding (PNC) and digital network coding (DNC), according to the instant rate requirement and dynamic channel condition. We first develop a close-form expression for the power consumption of the proposed scheme, which is further used to formulate a series of optimization problems under both symmetric and asymmetric traffic scenarios. Solving the optimization problems yields important system parameters that determine the optimal power allocations, time split between uplink and downlink transmissions as well as between PNC and DNC, respectively. We will discuss the possible overhead in the real implementation of the proposed scheme. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to compare the performance of the proposed hybrid scheme with the conventional PNC and DNC scheme, respectively.