Noncoherent LDPC-Coded Physical-Layer Network Coding Using Multitone FSK

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.