An enhanced approach to physical-layer network coding

In wireless networks, physical-layer network coding (PNC) is a practical technique to utilize the addition of two simultaneous arriving electromagnetic (EM) waves and realize exchanging messages in two time slots. When several nodes (more than two) need to exchange messages through one relay node, traditional PNC scheme can´t deal with the addition of more than two EM waves. The paper proposes an enhanced physical-layer network coding scheme (EPNC) to solve this problem. Through this proposition more than two nodes can exchange messages in two time slots. A four node wireless network model is analyzed and compared with traditional data transmission (TDT) and PNC schemes in the paper. It is concluded that the proposed scheme achieves progress in throughput compared with PNC.