  This paper proposes a novel joint non-binary network-channel code for the
Time-Division Decode-and-Forward Multiple Access Relay Channel (TD-DF-MARC),
where the relay linearly combines -- over a non-binary finite field -- the
coded sequences from the source nodes. A method based on an EXIT chart analysis
is derived for selecting the best coefficients of the linear combination.
Moreover, it is shown that for different setups of the system, different
coefficients should be chosen in order to improve the performance. This
conclusion contrasts with previous works where a random selection was
considered. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms,
in terms of its gap to the outage probabilities, the previously published joint
network-channel coding approaches. Besides, this gain is achieved by using very
short-length codewords, which makes the scheme particularly attractive for
low-latency applications.
