Interleaved Concatenations of Polar Codes With BCH and Convolutional Codes

Abstract—We analyze interleaved concatenation schemes of polar codes with outer binary BCH codes and convolutional codes. We show that both BCH-polar and Conv-polar codes can have a frame error rate that decays exponentially with the code length for all rates up to capacity, which is a substantial improvement in the error exponent over stand-alone polar codes. Interleaved concatenation with long constraint length convolutional codes is an effective way to leverage the fact that polarization increases the cutoff rate of the channel. Simulation results show that Conv-polar codes when decoded with the proposed soft-output multistage iterative decoding algorithm can outperform standalone polar codes decoded with successive cancellation or belief propagation decoding. It may be comparable to stand-alone polar codes with list decoding in the high SNR regime. In addition to this, we show that the proposed concatenation scheme requires lower memory and decoding complexity in comparison to be...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: JSAC
• Authors: Ying Wang, Krishna R. Narayanan, Yu-Chih Huang
• Keywords: JSAC 2016