Quantization based Estimate-and-Forward with unequal error protection for Turbo coded Physical layer network coding on the TWRC

In this paper, we investigate a novel Estimate-and-Forward (EF) scheme based on quantization for Turbo coded Physical layer network coding (PLNC) on the two-way relay channel (TWRC). The network coded soft information is estimated as soft bits, which are then transmitted in quantized form. According to the different importance of different bits of the quantization index, unequal error protection (UEP) is then applied using multilevel coding (MLC). The simulation results indicate that the Bit Error Rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme is superior to that of the traditional Estimate-and-Forward scheme.