# Comparison of Polar Decoders with Existing Low-Density Parity-Check and Turbo Decoders

## TL;DR

This paper compares polar decoders with LDPC and Turbo decoders in terms of error-correction performance and hardware efficiency to identify their practical advantages and guide future research.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of polar, LDPC, and Turbo decoders, highlighting their relative strengths and hardware implementation considerations.

## Key findings

- Polar decoders can outperform LDPC and Turbo decoders in certain applications.
- Hardware efficiency varies significantly among the different decoder types.
- The study identifies specific scenarios where polar codes are most advantageous.

## Abstract

Polar codes are a recently proposed family of provably capacity-achieving error-correction codes that received a lot of attention. While their theoretical properties render them interesting, their practicality compared to other types of codes has not been thoroughly studied. Towards this end, in this paper, we perform a comparison of polar decoders against LDPC and Turbo decoders that are used in existing communications standards. More specifically, we compare both the error-correction performance and the hardware efficiency of the corresponding hardware implementations. This comparison enables us to identify applications where polar codes are superior to existing error-correction coding solutions as well as to determine the most promising research direction in terms of the hardware implementation of polar decoders.