EFFECT OF CHANNEL ESTIMATION ERROR ON PERFORMANCE OF PHYSICAL LAYER NETWORK CODING

EFFECT OF CHANNEL ESTIMATION ERROR
ON PERFORMANCE OF PHYSICAL LAYER NETWORK CODING

By Keyvan Yasami

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Ali Abedi

A Lay Abstract of the Thesis Presented
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Master of Science
(in Electrical Engineering)
May, 2011
 

Cooperative relaying can improve the overall performance of a communication
network in various scenarios in which a terminal acts as a traffic relay for other users. A
relay is a terminal that has no data of its own and its role is to help the communication
between other nodes. Examples of these scenarios can be found in home and consumer communication
networks, different applications of wireless sensor networks such as environmental monitoring, target tracking, etc.

Network coding is one way to improve the overall performance of a network
and considerable gains are foreseen in application of network coding in cooperative
relaying scenarios. Most prior works reported in the literature have made simplified
and idealistic assumptions, specifically, it is assumed that the communication channel
is perfectly known. However, in real world applications, this assumptions are not valid,
and receivers have to estimate the channel.

This thesis investigates the effect of imperfect channel estimation on performance of wireless communication networks which utilize physical layer network coding. This study can determine the required channel estimation accuracy in design of practical relaying systems that use network coding.