A novel pairing scheme to reduce error propagation in an amplify and forward multi-way relay network

In this paper, we propose a novel user pairing scheme to reduce the error propagation in an amplify and forward (AF) based multi-way relay network (MWRN). We consider a user pairing scheme, where, a common user is chosen based on its average channel gain to form pairs with every other user in the MWRN. We show that choosing the common user as the user with the minimum average channel gain reduces the contribution of the interference components from the common user's signal in the extracted signals of other users. This leads to better bit error rate (BER) performance for all other users. For the common user, the BER improves at high SNR but it degrades at low SNR. The results show that the proposed pairing scheme outperforms the existing pairing scheme in terms of average BER of different users at high SNR.