Multiway Physical-Layer Network Coding via Uniquely Decodable Codes

We focus on a multiway relay channel (MWRC) network where two or more users simultaneously exchange information with each other through the help of a relay node. We propose for the first time to apply ternary uniquely decodable (UD) code sets that we have developed to allow each user to uniquely recover the information bits from the noisy channel environment. One of the key features of the proposed scheme is that it utilizes a very simple decoding algorithm, which requires only a few logical comparisons. Simulation results in terms of bit error rate (BER) demonstrate that the performance of the proposed decoder is almost as good as the maximum-likelihood (ML) decoder. In addition to that through simulations, we show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the sum-rate capacity, which in turn can potentially improve overall throughput, as it needs only two time slots (TSs) to exchange information compared to the conventional methods.