On signal processing scheme based on network coding in relay-assisted D2D systems

Network coding (NC) can greatly improve a system’s performance on throughput and channel utilization via corresponding signal processing on the relay side. Implementation of NC in relay-assisted device-to-device (RA-D2D) communications is a promising way to further explore the advantages of RA-D2D communications in cellular systems. This paper proposes a signal processing scheme for RA-D2D which jointly takes into account NC and optimal relay selection. First, the optimal relay user equipment (UE) is selected by jointly considering the end-to-end data rate, end-to-end transmission delay, and relay survival time. Then, in the procedure of signal processing, the transmitted useful signal is combined with interference signal for NC operation, and finally, the original useful signal is recovered at the destination node. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is able to not only eliminate the interference effectively but also has a superior performance on end-to-end transmission delay, reachability, and amount of transmitted information than that without NC. In particular, signal processing via NC is equivalent to encrypting the signal, which further enhances the information security in D2D communications.