Physical layer network coding in generalized shadowed fading channels

Abstract

Although there has been a growing literature on physical layer network coding (PLNC) technique, to the best of our knowledge, performance analysis of the PLNC systems over the generalized shadowed fading channels modelled by independent but not necessarily identically distributed generalized-K distribution has not been reported so far. Generalized-K channel is versatile model which is capable of representing different levels of shadowing and multipath fading effects in the wireless environment. In this paper, we investigate outage and symbol error rate performance of the PLNC system consisting of two sources and one relay with one transmit/receive antenna in each node. Amplify and forward relaying method is used at the relay. More specifically, we utilize the moment generating function of the SNR which is obtained by the Padé approximation to evaluate the system performance. We also investigate the energy allocation problem to improve the system error performance by allocating the total energy optimally among the sources and the relay in different channel conditions. The analytical results are verified by Monte Carlo simulations.