On the Design of a Novel Joint Network-Channel Coding Scheme for the Multiple Access Relay Channel

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new joint network-channel coding scheme for the multiple access relay channel that optimally selects linear combination coefficients, significantly improving performance with short codewords for low-latency needs.

Contribution

It presents a novel non-binary joint network-channel coding method with an EXIT chart-based coefficient selection, outperforming previous schemes in low-latency scenarios.

Findings

Outperforms existing joint network-channel coding schemes in outage probability gap.

Optimal coefficient selection varies with system setup, unlike previous random methods.

Effective with very short codewords suitable for low-latency applications.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel joint non-binary network-channel code for the Time-Division Decode-and-Forward Multiple Access Relay Channel (TD-DF-MARC), where the relay linearly combines -- over a non-binary finite field -- the coded sequences from the source nodes. A method based on an EXIT chart analysis is derived for selecting the best coefficients of the linear combination. Moreover, it is shown that for different setups of the system, different coefficients should be chosen in order to improve the performance. This conclusion contrasts with previous works where a random selection was considered. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms, in terms of its gap to the outage probabilities, the previously published joint network-channel coding approaches. Besides, this gain is achieved by using very short-length codewords, which makes the scheme particularly attractive for low-latency applications.