Multi-user scheduling for network coded two-way relay channel in cellular systems

There has been a growing interest in analog network coding, which can improve system throughput and spectrum efficiency significantly in wireless systems. Two-way relay scenario is considered in this paper, where the base station (BS) and the relay are both equipped with multiple antennas, and each of K user equipments (UEs) in the cell has a single antenna. An advanced multi-user scheduling scheme is proposed for the analog network coded two-way relay channel, where UEs and BS exchange information via the relay node during two time slots. Because each UE with single antenna has poor transmission and reception capability, the scheduling scheme is carefully designed to decrease multi-user interference and optimize beamforming gain from BS to relay. Analytical results of sum rate and outage probability have been developed to demonstrate that the multi-user diversity gain can be achieved by the proposed scheme. Meanwhile, the user fairness of the proposed scheme is on the same order as that of round robin (RR), and the computation complexity only increases linearly with the number of users in the serving cell. Monte-Carlo simulation is conducted to exhibit the performance gains from the proposed scheduling scheme. Results show that the proposed channel correlation based user selection scheme outperforms existing traditional scheduling schemes significantly, even when the cellular user payload is low.