Low-complexity concatenated polar codes with excellent scaling behavior

Abstract

In this paper, highly efficient practical concatenated coding schemes with multiple short length polar codes and single-parity-check codes are proposed. As for hardware complexity, required memory space is significantly reduced by utilizing small decoding units geared to serialized decoding of short-length component polar codes. In theoretic analysis, each component short polar code shows much improved error-rate scaling-behavior thanks to simple single-parity-check decoding; the error rate decays with increasing overall code length as fast as in single stand alone code while retaining considerable hardware-memory advantage. Moreover, by applying list decoding and cyclic-redundancy-checking to each short component polar code, finite-length error-rate performance is comparable to list decoding of CRC-aided long polar codes while offering much lower memory-complexity implementation options.