Fast Software Polar Decoders

Among error-correcting codes, polar codes are the first to provably achieve channel capacity with an explicit construction. In this work, we present software implementations of a polar decoder that leverage the capabilities of modern general-purpose processors to achieve an information throughput in excess of 200 Mbps, a throughput well suited for software-defined-radio applications. We also show that, for a similar error-correction performance, the throughput of polar decoders both surpasses that of LDPC decoders targeting general-purpose processors and is competitive with that of state-of-the-art software LDPC decoders running on graphic processing units.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ICASSP 201

Comparison of Polar Decoders with Existing Low-Density Parity-Check and Turbo Decoders

Polar codes are a recently proposed family of provably capacity-achieving error-correction codes that received a lot of attention. While their theoretical properties render them interesting, their practicality compared to other types of codes has not been thoroughly studied. Towards this end, in this paper, we perform a comparison of polar decoders against LDPC and Turbo decoders that are used in existing communications standards. More specifically, we compare both the error-correction performance and the hardware efficiency of the corresponding hardware implementations. This comparison enables us to identify applications where polar codes are superior to existing error-correction coding solutions as well as to determine the most promising research direction in terms of the hardware implementation of polar decoders.Comment: Fixes small mistakes from the paper to appear in the proceedings of IEEE WCNC 2017. Results were presented in the "Polar Coding in Wireless Communications: Theory and Implementation" Worksho

Flexible and Low-Complexity Encoding and Decoding of Systematic Polar Codes

In this work, we present hardware and software implementations of flexible polar systematic encoders and decoders. The proposed implementations operate on polar codes of any length less than a maximum and of any rate. We describe the low-complexity, highly parallel, and flexible systematic-encoding algorithm that we use and prove its correctness. Our hardware implementation results show that the overhead of adding code rate and length flexibility is little, and the impact on operation latency minor compared to code-specific versions. Finally, the flexible software encoder and decoder implementations are also shown to be able to maintain high throughput and low latency.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications, 201