Uniquely Decodable Codes for Physical-Layer Network Coding in Wireless Cooperative Communications

Physical-layer network coding (PNC) has received much attention, both from academia and industry lately, since it takes advantages of multiple-access signals. Because of a reduced number of time slots (TSs), PNC is capable of improving throughput significantly, especially for a typical 3-node network consisting of 2 user terminals and 1 relay node. However, a network with M nodes (M > 3) and without adopting additional techniques needs (2M - 2) TSs to realize information exchange among all the nodes, since network coding is unable to distinguish between users at the relay node. This paper proposes uniquely decodable codes (UDCs) for PNC in wireless cooperative communications. The proposed UDC requires only two TSs for information exchange irrespective of the number of nodes in the network. This paper also investigates the amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward modes for UDC-based PNC. The bit error rate and throughput of the proposed schemes are analyzed in this paper. Using simulation results, we demonstrate that our theoretical results align well with the simulation results.