Physical Layer Network Coding Based Two-Way Relay for 60 GHz Millimeter-Wave Wireless Personal Area Networks

In this chapter, we investigated a promising physical layer network coding-based two-way relay technique for the emerging 60 GHz millimeter-wave wireless personal area networks (WPANs), in order to address the problem of throughput reduction in relay nodes caused by the blockage of links. Because of the small wavelength at 60 GHz frequency band, links may be seriously blocked by the involved obstacles such as furniture and humans. The key idea of the most common solution to handle blockage proposed by now is to substitute the two line-of-sight (LOS) links for the blocked link. However, this method reduces the throughput of the network by a factor of two, which may hence fail to provide the required QoS guarantees to realistic WPAN applications. Our suggested new approach introduces a two-way relay scheme using physical layer network coding to the 60 GHz millimeter-wave WPANs, which can accomplish information exchange within two time slots instead of four. Simulation results, such as bit error rate and throughput, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-way relay scheme in 60 GHz WPANs.