In practical asynchronous physical-layer network coding (APNC) systems, the symbols from multiple transmitters to a common receiver may be misaligned. The knowledge of the amount of symbol misalignment, hence its estimation, is important to PNC decoding. This paper addresses the problem of symbol-misalignment estimation and the problem of optimal PNC decoding given the misalignment estimate, assuming the APNC system uses the root-raised-cosine pulse to carry signals (RRC-APNC).For symbol-misalignment estimation, we put forth an optimal estimator that is substantially more accurate than prior schemes. Our estimator makes use of double baud-rate samples, and hence is information-lossless since the double baud-rate samples capture all the information embedded in the continuous-time signal shaped by the assumed RRC pulse. Extensive simulations show that the meansquare-error (MSE) gains of our double baud-rate estimator over the baud-rate estimator are up to 8 dB. For PNC decoding, we devise optimal APNC decoders under inaccurate symbol-misalignment estimates. In particular, we prove and present a new whitening transformation to whiten the noise of the double baud-rate samples. Given the whitened samples, we construct a factor graph for a sum-product algorithm (SPA) to optimally decode the network-coded message. We further investigate the decoding performance of various estimation-and-decoding solutions for RRC-APNC. Simulation results indicate that: (i) A large roll-off factor of the RRC pulse is preferable in order to reduce decoder complexity while maintaining good performance. (ii) With a large roll-off factor, double baud-rate decoding is indispensable. Compared with a baud-rate sampling system (both estimation and decoding are based on baud-rate samples), a double baud-rate sampling system (both estimation and decoding are based on double baud-rate samples) yields 4.5 dB gains on symbol error rate (SER) performance in an AWGN channel, and 2 dB gains on packet error rate (PER) performance in a flat Rayleigh fading channel.(iii) Under a large roll-off factor, our double baud-rate estimator yields considerable improvements on decoding performance over the baud-rate estimator assuming the double baud-rate decoder is used in both cases. In an AWGN channel, the SER performance gains are up to 2 dB. In a flat Rayleigh fading channel, the PER performance gains are up to 1 dB.
Index TermsPhysical-layer network coding, asynchronous PNC, pulse shaping, symbol misalignment estimation, SPA, noise whitening.