Physical layer network coding: An outage analysis in cellular network

Physical layer network coding (PLNC) has been proposed to improve throughput of the two-way relay channel, where two nodes communicate with each other, being assisted by a relay node. Most of the works related to PLNC are focused on a simple three-node model and they do not take into account the impact of interference from other transmissions. Unlike these conventional studies, in this paper, we apply PLNC to a large-scale cellular network in the presence of intercell interference (ICI). In cellular networks, a terminal and a Base Station (BS) have different transmission power, which causes different impact of ICI on downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) phase. We theoretically derive outage probability with a tractable approach based on stochastic geometry which accurately models ICI. Moreover, we compare the performance of PLNC with Direct and conventional Relay scheme. With the obtained numerical results, we discuss how the interference and the difference of transmission power affect outage probability achieved by PLNC.