Threshold-Based Fast Successive-Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes

Fast SC decoding overcomes the latency caused by the serial nature of the SC decoding by identifying new nodes in the upper levels of the SC decoding tree and implementing their fast parallel decoders. In this work, we first present a novel sequence repetition node corresponding to a particular class of bit sequences. Most existing special node types are special cases of the proposed sequence repetition node. Then, a fast parallel decoder is proposed for this class of node. To further speed up the decoding process of general nodes outside this class, a threshold-based hard-decision-aided scheme is introduced. The threshold value that guarantees a given error-correction performance in the proposed scheme is derived theoretically. Analysis and hardware implementation results on a polar code of length $1024$ with code rates $1/4$, $1/2$, and $3/4$ show that our proposed algorithm reduces the required clock cycles by up to $8\%$, and leads to a $10\%$ improvement in the maximum operating frequency compared to state-of-the-art decoders without tangibly altering the error-correction performance. In addition, using the proposed threshold-based hard-decision-aided scheme, the decoding latency can be further reduced by $57\%$ at $\mathrm{E_b}/\mathrm{N_0} = 5.0$~dB.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communication

Polar Codes over Fading Channels with Power and Delay Constraints

The inherent nature of polar codes being channel specific makes it difficult to use them in a setting where the communication channel changes with time. In particular, to be able to use polar codes in a wireless scenario, varying attenuation due to fading needs to be mitigated. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no comprehensive work in this direction thus far. In this work, a practical scheme involving channel inversion with the knowledge of the channel state at the transmitter, is proposed. An additional practical constraint on the permissible average and peak power is imposed, which in turn makes the channel equivalent to an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel cascaded with an erasure channel. It is shown that the constructed polar code could be made to achieve the symmetric capacity of this channel. Further, a means to compute the optimal design rate of the polar code for a given power constraint is also discussed.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Spatially-Coupled MacKay-Neal Codes and Hsu-Anastasopoulos Codes

Kudekar et al. recently proved that for transmission over the binary erasure channel (BEC), spatial coupling of LDPC codes increases the BP threshold of the coupled ensemble to the MAP threshold of the underlying LDPC codes. One major drawback of the capacity-achieving spatially-coupled LDPC codes is that one needs to increase the column and row weight of parity-check matrices of the underlying LDPC codes. It is proved, that Hsu-Anastasopoulos (HA) codes and MacKay-Neal (MN) codes achieve the capacity of memoryless binary-input symmetric-output channels under MAP decoding with bounded column and row weight of the parity-check matrices. The HA codes and the MN codes are dual codes each other. The aim of this paper is to present an empirical evidence that spatially-coupled MN (resp. HA) codes with bounded column and row weight achieve the capacity of the BEC. To this end, we introduce a spatial coupling scheme of MN (resp. HA) codes. By density evolution analysis, we will show that the resulting spatially-coupled MN (resp. HA) codes have the BP threshold close to the Shannon limit.Comment: Corrected typos in degree distributions \nu and \mu of MN and HA code