SER Analysis of Physical Layer Network Coding over Rayleigh Fading Channels with QPSK Modulation

Physical layer network coding (PNC) is a relatively new transmission paradigm in networking, which can improve the network throughput and spectral efficiency greatly by exploiting interference instead of avoiding it. To discuss the performance of PNC more practically, this paper investigates the symbol error rate (SER) of PNC over Rayleigh fading channels. Firstly, we extend the nearest neighbor approximation method to analyze the SER of PNC and then derive the closed-form of PNC's SER with QPSK modulation over Rayleigh fading channels. Simulation and numerical results validate our theoretical analysis and show that the derived SER expression can characterize the SER performance of PNC over Rayleigh fading channels correctly.