A practical physical network coding scheme over hybrid field

Physical layer network coding (PNC) exploits the broadcast nature of wireless channels to obtain transmission efficiency gains over traditional network coding schemes. Nevertheless, most PNC schemes are proposed for the two-way relay network where a terminal node is not only a source but also a destination. This paper proposes a joint network coding and modulation (JNCM) scheme under a more general one-way relay network. The JNCM scheme is operated over hybrid field. It is able to adjust its transmission rate according to the channel condition, and enables a reliable transmission of different throughput under different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The proposed scheme achieves a better transmission efficiency than the PNC scheme based on the structure codes and a better symbol error rate (SER) performance than the complex field network coding. The excellent performances of JNCM are proved by our simulation results.