A comparison of different physical layer network coding techniques for the satellite environment

The increased interest around the concept of "physical layer network coding" has generated a whole range of different technical solutions to implement it, which tradeoff complexity at the different elements of the network. While the effectiveness of this concept has been safely established for the two way relay channel, far less investigation has touched more sophisticated topologies, neither terrestrial nor satellite. Hence the scalability of such concepts has not yet been duly analyzed. We provide in this paper a first evaluation of this important idea in the satellite environment. Results show that the amplify-and-forward paradigm would scale rather badly and thus some computational capability at the relay (i.e., the satellite or the controlling gateway) are necessary.