Physical-layer Network Coding: A High Performance PHY-layer Decoder

Physical-layer network coding (PNC) can potentially boost the throughput of a two-way relay network by 100% compared with conventional packet forwarding schemes. However, the complexity of PNC channel decoders can be considerably higher than the complexity of channel decoders for point-to-point communication systems. Although many PNC channel decoders proposed to date have good decoding performance, they may not be feasibly implemented in practical systems due to their high computation complexities. This paper presents a reduced-complexity decoder (RCD), a PNC decoder with adjustable decoding complexity that is amenable to real-time implementation. We experimentally evaluate the performance-complexity trade-off of RCD. Our experimental results show that RCD can achieve substantial throughput gain over state-of-the-art decoders proposed for real-time PNC systems.