Joint-Denoise-and-Forward Protocol for Multi-Way Relay Networks

Abstract — This paper considers a multi-way relay network in which multiple users intend to achieve full information exchange with one another with the aid of a single relay. The denoise-and-forward (DNF) protocol with binary physical-layer network coding (PNC) is considered. A novel denoising scheme is proposed which does not require any modification on the communication mechanism of the original DNF protocol but only exploits the correlation among multiple received signals at the relay. The decision regions and denoise mapping for the proposed scheme and the original scheme are illustrated and compared for an exemplary three-way relay network. Simulation results verify the efficacy of the proposed scheme in achieving improved user decoding performance. Index Terms — Physical-layer network coding, denoise-and-forward, multi-way relay networks