Polar Codes with Mixed-Kernels

TL;DR

This paper introduces mixed-kernels polar codes that combine different kernels over various alphabet sizes, enhancing error correction performance and complexity over traditional polar codes.

Contribution

It proposes a novel mixed-kernels polar coding scheme and analyzes its polarization properties and finite-length performance improvements.

Findings

Improved error correction performance

Reduced complexity in decoding

Strong polarization properties related to constituent kernels

Abstract

A generalization of the polar coding scheme called mixed-kernels is introduced. This generalization exploits several homogeneous kernels over alphabets of different sizes. An asymptotic analysis of the proposed scheme shows that its polarization properties are strongly related to the ones of the constituent kernels. Simulation of finite length instances of the scheme indicate their advantages both in error correction performance and complexity compared to the known polar coding structures.