On the performance of bi-directional cognitive radio system with network coding at the physical layer

Recently, a variant of network coding at the physical layer named wireless network coding (WNC) has gained much attention due to it’s simplicity and capacity improvement of a bi-directional link. In this paper, we design and analyze a bi-directional cognitive radio (CR) system with multiple pairs based on WNC while taking into account the imperfect spectrum sensing and interference from/to the CR system. In addition, we design a resource allocation framework consisting of a subcarrier allocation strategy with different priority assignments and optimal power allocation algorithm. We show that the quality of service within the CR system highly depends on a proper design of the spectrum sensing process to minimize the probability of missed detection, while the spectrum efficiency of the CR system increases with the number of pairs within the system to which we assign priorities.