Physical-Layer Network Coding Aided Two-Way Relay for Transmitted-Reference UWB Networks

A physical-layer network coding (PNC) aided two-way relay scheme is proposed for Transmitted-Reference (TR) UWB networks. In particular, a novel noncoherent UWB-PNC detector is investigated for the TR UWB networks. Inheriting the simplicity of the TR-UWB receiver, the proposed PNC detector is based on the autocorrelation receiver (AcR) with simple structure, which effectively suppresses the multi-user interference and harvests the multipath energy. Equipped with the proposed TR UWB-PNC detector, the relay node first detects the bitwise XORed symbol directly from the overlapped information bearing waveforms transmitted from the source nodes, then broadcasts the estimate of the XORed symbol to achieve efficient two-way relay. Simulation results show that, compared with the non-relay, one-way relay and two-way relay with time division multiple access (TDMA) and network coded broadcasting (NCBC), the proposed PNC aided two-way scheme significantly improves both the energy and spectral efficiencies of the TR-UWB networks.