A survey of physical-layer network coding in wireless networks

Network coding (NC) can improve the network performance, facilitate algorithm/protocol design, and deal with application-specific problems in wireless networks. Recently, inspired by the traditional network-layer NC, physical-layer network coding (PLNC) has been proposed to further improve the performance achieved by traditional NC schemes. PLNC has been proven to outperform traditional NC, be able to use physical-layer functionalities, and improve performance on relay communications. PLNC schemes can also use cross-layer information to perform the optimization of network performance. In this paper, up-to-date related issues of PLNC schemes and future trends will be discussed. We can see that PLNC in wireless networks is a promising research area and there is much room left for future contributions.