In this paper, hybrid relaying schemes are investigated in the two-way relay channel, where the relay node is able to adaptively switch between different forwarding schemes based on the current channel state and its decoding status and thus provides more flexibility as well as improved performance. The analysis is conducted from the energy efficiency perspective for two transmission protocols distinguished by whether exploiting the direct link between two main communicating nodes (the source

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... destination nodes, and vice versa since it is two way communication) or not. A realistic power model taking circuitry power consumption of all involved nodes into account is employed. The energy efficiency is optimized in terms of consumed energy per bit subject to the Quality of Service (QoS) constraint. Numerical results show that the hybrid schemes are able to achieve the highest energy efficiency due to its capability of adapting to the channel variations and the protocol where the direct link is exploited is more energy efficient.