Low Complexity Belief Propagation Polar Code Decoders

Since its invention, polar code has received a lot of attention because of its capacity-achieving performance and low encoding and decoding complexity. Successive cancellation decoding (SCD) and belief propagation decoding (BPD) are two of the most popular approaches for decoding polar codes. SCD is able to achieve good error-correcting performance and is less computationally expensive as compared to BPD. However SCDs suffer from long latency and low throughput due to the serial nature of the successive cancellation algorithm. BPD is parallel in nature and hence is more attractive for high throughput applications. However since it is iterative in nature, the required latency and energy dissipation increases linearly with the number of iterations. In this work, we borrow the idea of SCD and propose a novel scheme based on sub-factor-graph freezing to reduce the average number of computations as well as the average number of iterations required by BPD, which directly translates into lower latency and energy dissipation. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has no performance degradation and achieves significant reduction in computation complexity over the existing methods.Comment: 6 page

An Iteratively Decodable Tensor Product Code with Application to Data Storage

The error pattern correcting code (EPCC) can be constructed to provide a syndrome decoding table targeting the dominant error events of an inter-symbol interference channel at the output of the Viterbi detector. For the size of the syndrome table to be manageable and the list of possible error events to be reasonable in size, the codeword length of EPCC needs to be short enough. However, the rate of such a short length code will be too low for hard drive applications. To accommodate the required large redundancy, it is possible to record only a highly compressed function of the parity bits of EPCC's tensor product with a symbol correcting code. In this paper, we show that the proposed tensor error-pattern correcting code (T-EPCC) is linear time encodable and also devise a low-complexity soft iterative decoding algorithm for EPCC's tensor product with q-ary LDPC (T-EPCC-qLDPC). Simulation results show that T-EPCC-qLDPC achieves almost similar performance to single-level qLDPC with a 1/2 KB sector at 50% reduction in decoding complexity. Moreover, 1 KB T-EPCC-qLDPC surpasses the performance of 1/2 KB single-level qLDPC at the same decoder complexity.Comment: Hakim Alhussien, Jaekyun Moon, "An Iteratively Decodable Tensor Product Code with Application to Data Storage

Coordinated design of coding and modulation systems

The joint optimization of the coding and modulation systems employed in telemetry systems was investigated. Emphasis was placed on formulating inner and outer coding standards used by the Goddard Spaceflight Center. Convolutional codes were found that are nearly optimum for use with Viterbi decoding in the inner coding of concatenated coding systems. A convolutional code, the unit-memory code, was discovered and is ideal for inner system usage because of its byte-oriented structure. Simulations of sequential decoding on the deep-space channel were carried out to compare directly various convolutional codes that are proposed for use in deep-space systems