Joint power allocation and relay selection in network-coded multi-unicast systems

Physical-layer network coding (PNC) promises a significant gain In overall network throughput for multi-user cooperative communications. In a multi-unicast scenario, one drawback associated with PNC is an additional noise term, coined as network coding (NC) noise, which severely degrades the system data rate. In this paper, our contribution to address this challenging problem is source and relay power control with the objective of maximization of the minimum average achievable rate among all the source-destination pairs subject to a given total power constraint. We further develop a joint power allocation and relay selection scheme, which only rely on long-term channel statistics, to extend our results to general network topologies. We show that the joint optimization problem can be divided into two problems: optimal power allocation and optimal relay selection where the former is scalable and leads to a power assignment algorithm that exhibits the same optimization complexity for any number of sources in the network and the latter can be performed in a decentralized manner. By means of simulations, we validate our theoretical developments and verify the efficiency of our algorithm in improving the average achievable rate compared to a multi-unicast system with no power control or relay selection. We conclude that the proposed algorithm largely combats the adverse effects of NC noise while achieving near optimal fairness.