Performance analysis of user fair-based relay adaptive power allocation in physical-layer network coding cooperation

Network Coding (NC) is an effective technology to enhance the cooperative system spectral efficiency. However, since it is network-oriented, the existing performance metric of single-user outage can not comprehensively evaluate its gain and the impact to the entire network, which affect the user fairness. This paper proposes two novel user fair-based adaptive relay power allocation algorithms in single-relay NC cooperative multiple access channels. Firstly, common outage probability is employed as the performance metric, and to minimize it, a specific condition is deduced. On this basis, the instantaneous channel information-based adaptive relay power allocation scheme and the channel statistic information-based one with lower complexity are designed respectively, which make users’ signals superimposed at accurately calculated proportion to maintain fairness. Simulation results show that compared with other existing schemes, the proposed schemes can best maintain user fairness, and effectively improve the common outage performance of the whole system, at the expense of small spectral efficiency.