BER Analysis of Physical-Layer Network Coding in the AWGN Channel With Burst Pulses

The essential idea behind physical-layer network coding (PNC) is to superimpose signals so as to improve throughput. Current studies focus mainly on PNC over the AWGN or Rayleigh channels without consideration of burst pulses. This paper aims to evaluate the bit error rate (BER) performance of classical PNC, over a mixed channel that considers the combined effects of Gaussian noise and burst pulses. Besides, this paper explores the use of the Reed-Solomon (RS) codes to improve the BER performance of PNC over the mixed channel. Simulation results show that burst pulses deteriorate the BER significantly, and the RS codes are able to compensate for substantial BER performance degradation.