  This paper proposes and experimentally demonstrates a first wireless local
area network (WLAN) system that jointly exploits physical-layer network coding
(PNC) and multiuser decoding (MUD) to boost system throughput. We refer to this
multiple access mode as Network-Coded Multiple Access (NCMA). Prior studies on
PNC mostly focused on relay networks. NCMA is the first realized multiple
access scheme that establishes the usefulness of PNC in a non-relay setting.
NCMA allows multiple nodes to transmit simultaneously to the access point (AP)
to boost throughput. In the non-relay setting, when two nodes A and B transmit
to the AP simultaneously, the AP aims to obtain both packet A and packet B
rather than their network-coded packet. An interesting question is whether
network coding, specifically PNC which extracts packet (A XOR B), can still be
useful in such a setting. We provide an affirmative answer to this question
with a novel two-layer decoding approach amenable to real-time implementation.
Our USRP prototype indicates that NCMA can boost throughput by 100% in the
medium-high SNR regime (>=10dB). We believe further throughput enhancement is
possible by allowing more than two users to transmit together.
