Nonuniform Quantized Decoder for Polar Codes with Minimum Distortion Quantizer

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonuniform quantized decoder for polar codes that minimizes quantization distortion, achieving near float-point performance with significantly fewer bits, and outperforming previous uniform quantizers.

Contribution

It presents a novel nonuniform quantizer design for polar code decoders using dynamic programming, with proven optimality and improved error correction performance.

Findings

Error correction performance degradation is less than 0.1 dB at 5-bit quantization.

Outperforms previous uniform quantized decoders for polar codes.

Quantizer design minimizes distortion and is proven optimal.

Abstract

We propose a nonuniform quantized decoder for polar codes. The design metric of the quantizers is to minimize the distortion incurred by quantization. The quantizers are obtained via dynamic programming and the optimality of the quantizer is proved as well. Simulation results show that the error correction performance degradation of the proposed nonuniform quantized decoder is less than 0.1 dB compared to conventional float-point decoders under 5-bit nonuniform quantization, outperforming previous uniform quantized decoders for polar codes significantly.