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