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

As a subfield of network coding, PNC can effectively enhance the throughput of wireless networks by mapping superimposed signals at the receiver to other forms of user messages. Over the past 20 years, PNC has received significant research attention and has been widely studied in various communication scenarios, for example, TWRC, NOMA in 5G networks, random access networks, and so on. Later on, channel-coded PNC and related communication techniques were investigated to ensure network reliability, 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-aided 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.