Power allocation and transmission scheduling for a network with bidirectional relaying links

In this paper, we study packet transmission scheduling for a network with bidirectional relaying links, where the relay station can use network coding to combine packets to multiple receivers and opportunistically decide the number of packets to be combined in each transmission. Two cases are considered, depending on whether nodes are allowed to overhear transmissions of each other. A constrained Markov decision process is first formulated with an objective to minimize the average delay of packet transmissions, subject to the maximum and average transmission power limits of the relay node. The complexity for solving the constrained Markov decision process MDP is prohibitively high, although the computational complexity for the no-overhearing case can be greatly reduced. Heuristic schemes are then proposed, one applies to the general case, and another applies to only the no-overhearing case. Numerical results demonstrate that the heuristic schemes can achieve close-to-optimum average packet transmission delay, and furthermore, the second scheme achieves lower maximum delay while keeping the same average packet transmission delay and relay node power consumption as the first one. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.