Performance Analysis of Bidirectional Communication Protocols Based on Decode-and-Forward Relaying

We study and compare the performance of three very typical bidirectional communication protocols based on the decode-and-forward relaying: time-division broadcast (TDBC), physical-layer network coding (PNC), and opportunistic source selection (OSS). We first derive the exact closed-form outage probabilities for the PNC and OSS protocols and an exact but one-integral form outage probability for the TDBC protocol. To gain more insight, we also derive closed-form asymptotic outage probability expressions for all protocols, with which we obtain further analytical results on the asymptotic optimal power allocation, the asymptotic optimal relay location, and the performance gain of the OSS protocol over the TDBC protocol in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Finally, we study the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) for each protocol both in the finite and infinite SNR regimes.