The original concept of physical-layer network coding (PNC) was first proposed in a MobiCom challenge paper in 2006 as a new paradigm to boost the throughput of wireless relay networks. Since then, PNC has attracted a wide following within the research community. A high point of PNC research was a theoretical proof that the use of nested lattice codes in PNC could achieve the capacity of a two-way relay network to within half bit. Many practical challenges, however, remain to be addressed before the full potential of lattice-coded PNC can be realized. Two major challenges are channel alignment of distributed nodes and complexity reduction of lattice encoding-decoding. This paper reports a first comprehensive implementation of a lattice-coded PNC system. Our contributions are twofold: 1) we design and demonstrate a low-overhead channel precoding scheme that can accurately align the channels of distributed nodes driven by independent low-cost temperature-compensated oscillators (TCXO); 2) we adapt the low-density lattice code (LDLC) for use in practical PNC systems. Our lattice-coded PNC implementation yields good throughput performance in static line-of-sight (LoS) scenario and mobile non-LoS scenarios.
['Yihua Tan', 'Soung Chang Liew', 'Tao Huang']
Mobile Lattice-Coded Physical-Layer Network Coding With Practical Channel Alignment