Relay selection with network coding in two-way relay Nakagami channels

This paper presents the design of joint network coding(NC) and relay selection(RS) over independent, but not necessarily identically distributed Nakagami fading channels. The selected relays perform NC on the received signals sent from the two users and forward them to both users in three time slots and the relay selection criterion is minimizing the instantaneous BER of the worse user, the criterion of which can achieve almost exactly the same BER performance as the optimal RS at all SNR ranges. The performance is analyzed under two types of Nakagami fading channel, one is the Nakagami-m channel another is the Nakagami-n channel. The exact bit error rate(BER) expressions are derived and verified through Monte Carlo simulations.