Performance evaluation of a network coding scheme for interference channels with LTE codes

In this paper we consider a recently proposed quantise-forward network coding strategy, whereby a relay is used to help resolve the interference caused by independently transmitting source nodes. The relay listens to the interfering signals and performs a course lattice-based quantisation of the observations without decoding the information messages. The quantised observations are forwarded to the destination nodes on an interference-free channel and help the receivers improve the decoding process. We generalise the optimisation of the nested lattice construction to any number of quantisation bits and evaluate the strategy on the turbo codes used in the 3GPP long term evolution (LTE) to assess the viability of the strategy in LTE-based small cell deployments.