Design of BICM-ID for two-way relay channels

This paper investigates the iterative decoding for spectrally efficient two-way relay (TWR) communications in which two end nodes exchange information through a relay (R). With the use of physical-layer network coding (PNC), information exchange throughput can be significantly improved as only two orthogonal time slots (TS) are required to realize both the multiple access (MAC) and the broadcast (BC) transmissions. During the MAC stage, transmitted symbols from the end nodes are superimposed at R which decodes the exclusive-or (XOR) information of the two end nodes. However, with a high order modulation, symbol superposition will cause demapping ambiguity. This paper proposes a TWR communication system that employs the bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM). The iterative decoding, namely, the BICM-ID, is introduced to dissolve the demapping ambiguity. With iterative decoding, the transmitted symbol pair probabilities can be better estimated so that the demapper can provide better coded bit information for the decoder. The proposed work generalizes the iterative demapping-decoding approach for TWR channels. Our simulation results demonstrate significant iterative decoding gains can be achieved with a tendency of approaching the XOR-decoding bound.