Simplified Compute-and-Forward and Its Performance Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simplified compute-and-forward scheme that reduces implementation complexity, analyzes its outage probability, and compares its robustness against channel estimation errors with the optimal CMF method.

Contribution

A new simplified CMF method is proposed, with performance analysis and robustness evaluation against channel estimation errors.

Findings

The simplified CMF reduces implementation complexity.

It provides an upper bound on outage probability for the optimal CMF.

The simplified scheme is more robust to channel estimation errors.

Abstract

The compute-and-forward (CMF) method has shown a great promise as an innovative approach to exploit interference toward achieving higher network throughput. The CMF was primarily introduced by means of information theory tools. While there have been some recent works discussing different aspects of efficient and practical implementation of CMF, there are still some issues that are not covered. In this paper, we first introduce a method to decrease the implementation complexity of the CMF method. We then evaluate the exact outage probability of our proposed simplified CMF scheme, and hereby provide an upper bound on the outage probability of the optimum CMF in all SNR values, and a close approximation of its outage probability in low SNR regimes. We also evaluate the effect of the channel estimation error (CEE) on the performance of both optimum and our proposed simplified CMF by simulations. Our simulation results indicate that the proposed method is more robust against CEE than the optimum CMF method for the examples considered.