Performance analysis of time division broadcast protocol with incremental relaying and symmetric users

This paper investigates two‐way relaying with direct link transmission. We propose to combine incremental relaying (IR) with the time division broadcast protocol (TDBC) to form a new scheme, termed TDBC‐IR, to increase the spectral efficiency of TDBC. Assuming half‐duplex decode‐and‐forward relaying, the performance of three protocols, that is, TDBC, TDBC‐IR, and physical‐layer network coding (PNC), are studied and compared, in terms of outage probability, expected rate (ER), and diversity‐multiplexing tradeoff. First, we reveal that the outage probability performance of TDBC‐IR is the same as that of TDBC and better than that of PNC. Second, we compare the ER and diversity‐multiplexing tradeoff performance of the three protocols based on the derived outage probability. The numerical results reveal that (1) the ER of TDBC‐IR is greater than that of TDBC and PNC in the whole signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR) region, that is TDBC‐IR has improved spectral efficiency performance; (2) the ER performance of TDBC is better than PNC in the low SNR region but worse in the high SNR region; (3) the maximum achievable diversity order of TDBC‐IR and TDBC are both two whereas that of PNC is one; (4) the maximum achievable multiplexing gain of TDBC‐IR is one, which is better than TDBC (its maximum achievable is 2/3) and achieves the maximum of PNC (its maximum achievable is one). Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.