A key issue in physical-layer network coding (PNC) is how to deal with the asynchrony between signals transmitted by multiple transmitters. That is, symbols transmitted by different transmitters could arrive at the receiver with symbol misalignment as well as relative carrier-phase offset. A second important issue is how to integrate channel coding with PNC to achieve reliable communication. This paper investigates these two issues and makes the following contributions: 1) We propose and investigate a general framework for decoding at the receiver based on belief propagation (BP). The framework can effectively deal with symbol and phase asynchronies while incorporating channel coding at the same time. 2) For unchannel-coded PNC, we show that for BPSK and QPSK modulations, our BP method can significantly reduce the asynchrony penalties compared with prior methods. 3) For QPSK unchannel-coded PNC, with a half symbol offset between the transmitters, our BP method can drastically reduce the performance penalty due to phase asynchrony, from more than 6 dB to no more than 1 dB. 4) For channel-coded PNC, with our BP method, both symbol and phase asynchronies actually improve the system performance compared with the perfectly synchronous case. Furthermore, the performance spread due to different combinations of symbol and phase offsets between the transmitters in channel-coded PNC is only around 1 dB. The implication of 3) is that if we could control the symbol arrival times at the receiver, it would be advantageous to deliberately introduce a half symbol offset in unchannel-coded PNC. The implication of 4) is that when channel coding is used, symbol and phase asynchronies are not major performance concerns in PNC.
We study the application of convolutional codes to two-way relay networks (TWRNs) with physical-layer network coding (PNC). When a relay node decodes coded signals transmitted by two source nodes simultaneously, we show that the Viterbi algorithm (VA) can be used by approximating the maximum likelihood (ML) decoding for XORed messages as two-user decoding. In this setup, for given memory length constraint, the two source nodes can choose the same convolutional code that has the largest free distance in order to maximize the performance. Motivated from the fact that the relay node only needs to decode XORed messages, a low complexity decoding scheme is proposed using a reduced-state trellis. We show that the reduced-state decoding can achieve the same diversity gain as the full-state decoding for fading channels.