International Journal of Engineering and Technology

Bidirectional relay network consists of two sources and a relay, where each node has a single antenna and operates in half duplex mode. The PLNC based OFDM system transmits numerous high data streams through narrow band flat fading subchannels to achieve high spectral efficiency over wide band channels. However in practice, I/Q imbalance is introduced at the radio frequency sections of the nodes affects the orthogonality among the subcarriers. In this paper, the bidirectional relay network is modelled with I/Q imbalance and the outage performance of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based bidirectional relay network which employs physical layer network coding (PLNC) is analyzed in the presence of In-phase and Quadrature (I/Q) imbalance at both the time slots.