Performance Analysis of Physical Layer Network Coding for Two-way Relaying over Non-regenerative Communication Satellites

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the performance of Physical Layer Network Coding (PLNC) over non-regenerative communication satellites, analyzing error bounds and throughput under different synchronization conditions to aid system design decisions.

Contribution

It provides the first performance analysis of PLNC on non-regenerative satellites, including error bounds and simulation results for various synchronization scenarios.

Findings

Error performance bounds derived for both synchronization conditions.

Simulation results show the impact of phase synchronization on BER and throughput.

Guidelines for system parameter selection based on analysis and results.

Abstract

Two-way relaying is one of the major applications of broadband communication satellites, for which an efficient technique is Physical Layer Network Coding (PLNC). Earlier studies have considered satellites employing PLNC with onboard processing. This paper investigates the performance of PLNC over non-regenerative satellites, as a majority of the operational and planned satellites have no onboard processing. Assuming that the channel magnitudes of the two users are equal, two operating conditions are considered with uncoded-QPSK relaying. In the first condition, both users are completely synchronized in phase and transmit power, and in the second condition, phase is not synchronized. The peak power constraint imposed by the satellite amplifier is considered and the error performance bounds are derived for both the conditions. The simulation results for end-to-end Bit Error Rate (BER) and throughput are provided. These results shall enable communication system designers to decide system parameters like power and linearity, and perform tradeoff analysis between different relaying schemes.