Joint design of channel coding and physical network coding for wireless networks

Network coding is becoming more and more popular in recent years for its ability to improve network throughput and robustness. In this paper, we investigate physical-layer network coding in wireless networks and propose a joint physical network coding (PNC) and channel coding implementation scheme for multiple-access channel, which makes use of additive nature of simultaneously arriving electromagnetic wave. Similar to channel coding decoding scheme of single channel, the proposed scheme takes advantage of linearity of Turbo code and network coding to directly estimate network-coding codeword, and thus is easier to implement. Moreover, We analyze the capacity of the proposed scheme for AWGN channel. The simulation results show that performance of the proposed scheme is promising to approach information theoretical limits of the traditional network-coding scheme which separates channel decoding from network coding, and about has 2.1dB improvement at a bit error rate (BER) of 10^-5 in AWGN channel over the traditional network-coding scheme with Turbo multiuser detector.