In this paper, we propose a joint polar coding and physical network coding (PNC) for two-user downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (PN-DNOMA) channels, since the successive-interference-cancellation-aided polar decoding cannot be optimal for finite blocklength transmissions. In the proposed scheme, we first constructed the XORed message of two user messages. Then, the XORed message was superimposed with the message of the weak User 2 for broadcast. By doing so, we can utilize the PNC mapping rule and polar decoding to directly recover the message of User 1, while at User 2, we equivalently constructed a long-length polar decoder to obtain its user message. The channel polarization and decoding performance can be greatly improved for both users. Moreover, we optimized the power allocation of the two users with their channel conditions by considering the user fairness and the performance. The simulation results showed that the proposed PN-DNOMA can achieve performance gains of about 0.4-0.7 dB over the conventional schemes in two-user downlink NOMA systems.
Keywords: physical layer network coding; polar code; two-user downlink non-orthogonal multiple access channels.