On the Concatenations of Polar Codes and Non-binary LDPC Codes

Yu, Qingping, Shi, Zhiping, Li, Xingwang, Zhang, Jiayi and Rabie, Khaled (2018) On the Concatenations of Polar Codes and Non-binary LDPC Codes. IEEE Access, 6. ISSN 2169-3536

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Abstract

An interleaved concatenation scheme of polar codes with non-binary low-density parity check (NBLDPC) codes is proposed in this paper to improve the error-correcting performance of polar codes with finite code length. The information blocks of inner polar codes are split into several information sub-blocks, and several segment successive cancellation list (SSCL) decoders are carried out in parallel for all inner polar codes. Moreover, for a better error-correcting performance, an improved SCL decoder with a selective extension is proposed for the concatenated polar codes, which will be referred to selective extended segment SCL (SES-SCL) decoder. The SESSCL decoder uses soft information of some unreliable information sub-blocks for the decoding of subsequent sub-blocks so as to mitigate the error propagation of premature hard decision of S-SCL decoder. Simulation results show that NBLDPC-polar codes can outperform Reed Solomon (RS)-polar codes. NBLDPCpolar codes with the proposed SES-SCL algorithm can also be comparable to pure polar codes with cyclic redundancy check aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoding with list size L = 4 in the high SNR, but require lower decoding storage. Therefore, NBLDPC-polar codes may strike a better balance between memory space and performance compared to the state-of-art schemes in the finite length regime.