Protocol design and data detection for two‐way relay networks with fractional asynchronous delays

In wireless two‐way relay systems, it is difficult to achieve perfect timing synchronization among different nodes. In this paper, we investigate relaying protocol design and data detect schemes for asynchronous two‐way relaying systems to combat the intersymbol interference caused by asynchronous transmission. We consider fractional asynchronous delays and two schemes are proposed based on cyclic prefixed single carrier block transmission, namely, the receiver frequency domain equalization scheme and relay synchronization and network coding (RSNC) scheme. In the receiver frequency domain equalization scheme, the relay simply amplifies the received signal and forwards to the two source nodes, and fractionally spaced frequency domain equalizer (FS‐FDE) is employed at the receiver to recover the transmit data. In the RSNC scheme, the asynchronous signals are resynchronized with an FS‐FDE at the relay node. The output signals of FS‐FDE are then demodulated and network coded before forwarding to the two source nodes. In this RSNC scheme, data detection at the source nodes is the same as that in synchronous networks because the asynchronous signals have already been synchronized at the relay node. Simulation results show that the performance of both schemes is almost the same as in the perfect synchronized two‐way relaying systems. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.