Hybrid field physical layer network coding in multi-user relay network

Physical layer network coding (PNC) exploits the broadcast nature of wireless channel to obtain transmission efficiency gains. This paper proposes a hybrid field physical layer network coding (HFNC) approach and applys HFNC to the multi-user relay networks. The proposed method enables a reliable transmission with variable throughput under different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). With given constellation rotations at sources, the points of the equivalent superpositioned (ESP) constellation cluster. The HFNC-based decoding can be divided into two layers. Point-level (PL) decoding over the complex-field achieves a higher throughput as complex field network coding (CFNC), while cloud-level decoding defined in the finite-field is able to resist bad channel with a lower throughput. Excellent performances of symbol error probability (SEP) and transmission efficiency are proved by both theoretical analysis and simulation results.