Opportunistic Network Coding Scheme for Two-Way Relay Wireless Networks: A Sum-Rate Maximization Approach

Applying network coding (NC) in the downlink of two-way relay networks can significantly increase the throughput. However, the fading nature of wireless channels usually causes great asymmetry between two downlink channels, which can degrade the performance of NC. Therefore, it is very necessary to perform an opportunistic scheme that selects between broadcast and unicast at the relay node based on channel side information. This paper focuses on the fundamental limit of the sum rate in the downlink. To solve the maximization problem of the sum rate in the downlink, we first introduce an auxiliary variable, known as marginal capacity income of transmit power, and then derive the corresponding power allocation in closed-form expression and present an opportunistic switching selection strategy between broadcast/unicast. Numerical results also show that our proposed scheme achieves a larger downlink sum throughput compared with other existing known schemes.