Exploiting Opportunistic Network Coding for Improving Wireless Reliability Against Co-Channel Interference

This paper investigates network coding with full diversity and a high rate for improving the reliability of wireless communications against the co-channel interference. We consider a cellular network composed of two user terminals that are intended to communicate with a common base station (BS), where a two-way relay node is used to assist the bidirectional communications between the users and BS. We propose an opportunistic network coding (ONC) scheme with the two-way relay, called two-way ONC, which operates depending on whether or not the relay node successfully decodes data packets of the user terminals and BS. Closed-form outage probability expressions of the uplink transmission (from users to BS) and downlink transmission (from BS to users) are derived for the proposed two-way ONC scheme in the presence of co-channel interference over Rayleigh fading channels. We also develop the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of the two-way ONC scheme and show that it obtains the full diversity and an increased multiplexing gain, as compared with conventional one-way relay methods. Additionally, numerical outage probability results demonstrate that the proposed two-way ONC scheme outperforms the conventional one-way relay approaches in terms of improving the communication's reliability against co-channel interference.