Practical network-coding scheme for two-way relay channels employing a rate-compatible punctured code

A cooperative communication in a two-way relay channel is a bidirectional communication between two terminals with the aid of a common relay. In order to improve the performance of the cooperative communication in a two-way relay channel, a network coding can be used to exploit the broadcasting nature of wireless transmission. In [8], it was shown that each individual link can achieve its own capacity when the length of the codewords is the same. However, the length of the codewords can be different in practical systems since the two-way relay channel is naturally asymmetric. Thus, in this paper, we show a practical network coding scheme with a given modulation and coding set by employing a rate-compatible puncturing technique. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can provide at least as good performance as that obtained in individual link without using special encoder/decoder.