Practical physical layer network coding in multi-sources relay channels via the compute-and-forward

Recent years have witnessed the development of the Compute-and-Forward (CF) as a successful solution to perform noiseless linear Physical Layer Network Coding (PLNC). Research outcomes shed considerable light on the promising gain of this strategy from information-theoretic perspective. What misses is to design practical PLNC schemes based on the Compute-and-Forward and to evaluate their end-to-end performance in real communication scenarios. In this work we try to fill the gap between theory and practice: we investigate end-to-end communication over a Multi-Sources Relay Channel where the CF is used at intermediate nodes. We figure out practical constraints that deserve special attention in real end-to-end communication design and propose reliable solutions that enable to meet the promised potential of the CF. In order to confirm our theoretical analysis, we evaluate performance of the proposed schemes at the destination in terms of both average achievable rate and error rates under practical low complexity nested lattice encoding.