Successive Cancellation Inactivation Decoding for Modified Reed-Muller and eBCH Codes

A successive cancellation (SC) decoder with inactivations is proposed as an efficient implementation of SC list (SCL) decoding over the binary erasure channel. The proposed decoder assigns a dummy variable to an information bit whenever it is erased during SC decoding and continues with decoding. Inactivated bits are resolved using information gathered from decoding frozen bits. This decoder leverages the structure of the Hadamard matrix, but can be applied to any linear code by representing it as a polar code with dynamic frozen bits. SCL decoders are partially characterized using density evolution to compute the average number of inactivations required to achieve the maximum a-posteriori decoding performance. The proposed measure quantifies the performance vs. complexity trade-off and provides new insight into dynamics of the number of paths in SCL decoding. The technique is applied to analyze Reed-Muller (RM) codes with dynamic frozen bits. It is shown that these modified RM codes perform close to extended BCH codes.Comment: Accepted at the 2020 ISI

Polar Coding Schemes for Cooperative Transmission Systems

: In this thesis, a serially-concatenated coding scheme with a polar code as the outer code and a low density generator matrix (LDGM) code as the inner code is firstly proposed. It is shown that that the proposed scheme provides a method to improve significantly the low convergence of polar codes and the high error floor of LDGM codes while keeping the advantages of both such as the low encoding and decoding complexity. The bit error rate results show that the proposed scheme by reasonable design have the potential to approach a performance close to the capacity limit and avoid error floor effectively. Secondly, a novel transmission protocol based on polar coding is proposed for the degraded half-duplex relay channel. In the proposed protocol, the relay only needs to forward a part of the decoded source message that the destination needs according to the exquisite nested structure of polar codes. It is proved that the scheme can achieve the capacity of the half-duplex relay channel while enjoying low encoding/decoding complexity. By modeling the practical system, we verify that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme designed by low-density parity-check codes by simulations. Finally, a generalized partial information relaying protocol is proposed for degraded multiple-relay networks with orthogonal receiver components (MRN-ORCs). In such a protocol, each relay node decodes the received source message with the help of partial information from previous nodes and re-encodes part of the decoded message for transmission to satisfy the decoding requirements for the following relay node or the destination node. For the design of polar codes, the nested structures are constructed based on this protocol and the information sets corresponding to the partial messages forwarded are also calculated. It is proved that the proposed scheme achieves the theoretical capacity of the degraded MRN-ORCs while still retains the low-complexity feature of polar codes

Applications of ordered weights in information transmission

This dissertation is devoted to a study of a class of linear codes related to a particular metric space that generalizes the Hamming space in that the metric function is defined by a partial order on the set of coordinates of the vector. We begin with developing combinatorial and linear-algebraic aspects of linear ordered codes. In particular, we define multivariate rank enumerators for linear codes and show that they form a natural set of invariants in the study of the duality of linear codes. The rank enumerators are further shown to be connected to the shape distributions of linear codes, and enable us to give a simple proof of a MacWilliams-like theorem for the ordered case. We also pursue the connection between linear codes and matroids in the ordered case and show that the rank enumerator can be thought of as an instance of the classical matroid invariant called the Tutte polynomial. Finally, we consider the distributions of support weights of ordered codes and their expression via the rank enumerator. Altogether, these results generalize a group of well-known results for codes in the Hamming space to the ordered case. Extending the research in the first part, we define simple probabilistic channel models that are in a certain sense matched to the ordered distance, and prove several results related to performance of linear codes on such channels. In particular, we define ordered wire-tap channels and establish several results related to the use of linear codes for reliable and secure transmission in such channel models. In the third part of this dissertation we study polar coding schemes for channels with nonbinary input alphabets. We construct a family of linear codes that achieve the capacity of a nonbinary symmetric discrete memoryless channel with input alphabet of size q=2^r, r=2,3,.... A new feature of the coding scheme that arises in the nonbinary case is related to the emergence of several extremal configurations for the polarized data symbols. We establish monotonicity properties of the configurations and use them to show that total transmission rate approaches the symmetric capacity of the channel. We develop these results to include the case of ``controlled polarization'' under which the data symbols polarize to any predefined set of extremal configurations. We also outline an application of this construction to data encoding in video sequences of the MPEG-2 and H.264/MPEG-4 standards

On Cyclic Polar Codes and the Burst Erasure Performance of Spatially-Coupled LDPC Codes

In this thesis, we produce our work on two of the state-of-the-art techniques in modern coding theory: polar codes and spatially-coupled LDPC codes. Polar codes were introduced in 2009 and proven to achieve the symmetric capacity of any binary-input discrete memoryless channel under low-complexity successive cancellation decoding. Since then, finite length (non-asymptotic) performance has been the primary concern with respect to polar codes. In this work, we construct cyclic polar codes based on a mixed-radix Cooley-Tukey decomposition of the Galois field Fourier transform. The main results are: we can, for the first time, construct, encode and decode polar codes that are cyclic, with their blocklength being arbitrary; for a given target block erasure rate, we can achieve significantly higher code rates on the erasure channel than the original polar codes, at comparable blocklengths; on the symmetric channel with only errors, we can perform much better than equivalent rate Reed-Solomon codes with the same blocklength, by using soft-decision decoding; and, since the codes are subcodes of higher rate RS codes, a RS decoder can be used if suboptimal performance suffices for the application as a trade-o_ for higher decoding speed. The programs developed for this work can be accessed at https://github.com/nrenga/cyclic_polar. In 2010, it was shown that spatially-coupled low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes approach the capacity of binary memoryless channels, asymptotically, with belief-propagation (BP) decoding. In our work, we are interested in the finite length average performance of randomly coupled LDPC ensembles on binary erasure channels with memory. The significant contributions of this work are: tight lower bounds for the block erasure probability (PB) under various scenarios for the burst pattern; bounds focused on practical scenarios where a burst affects exactly one of the coupled codes; expected error floor for the bit erasure probability (Pb) on the binary erasure channel; and, characterization of the performance of random regular ensembles, on erasure channels, with a single vector describing distinct types of size-2 stopping sets. All these results are verified using Monte-Carlo simulations. Further, we show that increasing variable node degree combined with expurgation can improve PB by several orders of magnitude in the number of bits per coupled code