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This paper investigates noncoherent detection in a two-way relay channel operated with physical layer network coding (PNC), assuming FSK modulation and short-packet transmissions. For noncoherent detection, the detector has access to the magnitude but not the phase of the received signal. For conventional communication in which a receiver receives the signal from a transmitter only, the phase does not affect the magnitude, hence the performance of the noncoherent detector is independent of the phase. PNC, on the other hand, is a multiuser system in which a receiver receives signals from multiple transmitters simultaneously. The relative phase of the signals from different transmitters affects the received signal magnitude through constructive-destructive interference. In particular, for good performance, the noncoherent detector of a multiuser system such as PNC must take into account the influence of the relative phase on the signal magnitude. Building on this observation, this paper delves into the fundamentals of PNC noncoherent detector design. To avoid excessive overhead, we assume a set-up in which the short packets in the PNC system do not have preambles. We show how the relative phase can be deduced directly from the magnitudes of the received data symbols, and that the knowledge of the relative phase thus deduced can in turn be used to enhance performance of noncoherent detection. Our overall detector design consists of two components: 1) a channel gains estimator that estimates channel gains without preambles; 2) a detector that builds on top of the estimated channel gains to jointly estimate relative phase and detect data using a belief propagation algorithm.Numerical results show that our detector performs nearly as well as a "fictitious" optimal detector that has perfect knowledge of the channel gains and relative phase. Although this paper focuses on PNC with FSK modulation, we believe the insight of this paper applies generally to noncoherent detection in other multiuser systems with other modulations. Specifically, our insight is that the relative phase of overlapped signals affects the signal magnitude in multiuser systems, but fortunately the relative phase 2 can be deduced from the magnitudes and this knowledge can be used to improve detection performance. Index TermsPhysical-layer network coding, noncoherent detection, frequency shift keying, short packet.

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