Physical-layer Network Coding: A Heterogeneous Software-Defined-Radio based Implementation

Collisions in multi-hop wireless networks down-grade the system's performance and affect its reliability. Therefore, most of the existing solutions aim to avoid or reduce the interference cases. Counter to all previous works, the newly proposed technique called Physical-layer Network Coding (PNC) transforms the collision's dilemma into an advantage in such a manner that multiple transmissions occur simultaneously and end nodes can extract the superimposed signals. Although there have been many theoretical studies on PN C efficiency, there have been few experiments with pure and heterogeneous PNC schematics. This paper presents the first heterogeneous PNC Software Defined Radio based implementation with a brief discussion of the main challenging related issues. Obtained results proved the efficacy of the proposed solution in indoor environment and serve as a proof for the feasibility of PNC in heterogeneous real-time applications,