Physical-Layer Network Coding: An Efficient Technique for Wireless Communications

As a subfield of network coding, physical-layer network coding (PNC) can effectively enhance the throughput of wireless networks by mapping superimposed signals at receiver to other forms of user messages. Over the past twenty years, PNC has received significant research attention and has been widely studied in various communication scenarios, e.g., two-way relay communications (TWRC), nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in 5G networks, random access networks, etc. To ensure network reliability, channel-coded PNC is proposed and related communication techniques are investigated, such as the design of channel code, low-complexity decoding, and cross-layer design. In this article, we briefly review the variants of channel-coded PNC wireless communications with the aim of inspiring future research activities in this area. We also put forth open research problems along with a few selected research directions under PNC-aided frameworks.