Near outage limit joint network coding and decoding for the Non-Orthogonal Multiple-Access Relay Channel

In this paper, we investigate the benefit of Joint Network Channel Coding (JNCC) for a new class of Multiple Access Relay Channel (MARC), defined as follows: (1) Independent sources communicate with a single destination in the presence of a relay; (2) The relay is half-duplex and applies a Selective Decode and Forward (SDF) strategy, i.e, it forwards only a deterministic function of the error-free decoded messages; (3) The sources are allowed to transmit simultaneously during both the listening phase and the transmission phase of the relay. We refer this model to as Non-Orthogonal MARC (NOMARC), which better leverages the broadcast nature of the radio channel than its more conservative orthogonal counterpart, i.e., Orthogonal MARC (OMARC). This paper aims at measuring the advantage brought by NOMARC/JNCC over OMARC/JNCC from both an information-theoretic and a practical code design perspectives.