A method to enhance the performance of successive cancellation decoding in polar codes

© 2016 IEEE. Polar codes are regarded as a major breakthrough in modern channel coding since they are capacity-achieving using simple successive cancellation (SC) decoding. However, this is only possible with significantly large code lengths which may not be applicable for many systems. In this paper, we focus on short length polar codes and present a method which can enhance the performance of the successive cancellation decoder. For the purpose of analysis, we discuss the SC code tree and show how the proposed method can improve the performance by increasing the computational nodes in the code tree. The results quantify the achieved performance improvement over the conventional SC decoder

Faulty Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes for the Binary Erasure Channel

We study faulty successive cancellation decoding of polar codes for the binary erasure channel. To this end, we introduce a simple erasure-based fault model and we show that, under this model, polarization does not happen, meaning that fully reliable communication is not possible at any rate. Moreover, we provide numerical results for the frame erasure rate and bit erasure rate and we study an unequal error protection scheme that can significantly improve the performance of the faulty successive cancellation decoder with negligible overhead.Comment: As presented at ISITA 201