A Joint Design of Physical Layer Network Coding and Channel Coding for Wireless Networks

Network coding has been receiving much attention recently for its ability to improve spectral efficiency and achieve throughput optimality. In this paper, we propose a practical scheme of joint physical layer network-channel coding for two-way relay scenario. At relay node physical-layer network coding (PNC) is employed to make use of the additive nature of simultaneously arriving electromagnetic wave (EW) for equivalent coding operation. In doing so, PNC can potentially achieve 50% throughput increase compared with straightforward network coding. Meanwhile, we take advantage of the linearity of Turbo code and soft detection module, which not only reduce the complexity of encoding and decoding, but also achieve good performance in high Signal Noise Ratio (SNR). Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the straightforward network coding in terms of channel capacity and Bit Error Rate (BER) performance when applied to wireless networks.