Physical Layer Network Coding for Uni-Cast Applications

Network coding has created tremendous research interest over the last few years. Latest research works even propose a transition from the digital message encoding mechanism on the network layer to a corresponding analog encoding approach on the physical layer. This technique is also known as physical layer network coding and allows the simultaneous reception of several signals at a common receiver. Coding gains by network coding are generally only achieved for multicast problem formulations, as network coding is not directly applicable to uni-cast scenarios. However, research has shown that some uni-cast problems can be re-formulated as multi-cast problems to take advantage of the network coding paradigm. This paper presents an analytical cross-layer optimization approach for network coding problems and analyzes the network coding solution of exemplarily chosen uni-cast problems.