Decoding Polar Codes via Noisy Quantum Gates: Quantum Circuits and Insights

TL;DR

This paper introduces QGateD-Polar, a quantum gate-based decoder for Polar codes, demonstrating maximum likelihood performance in ideal simulations and analyzing the impact of noise on decoding accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a novel quantum gate-based decoding method for Polar codes, leveraging quantum phenomena to potentially improve wireless error correction performance.

Findings

QGateD-Polar achieves maximum likelihood decoding in ideal simulations.

Performance degrades with increasing quantum noise levels.

The approach bridges quantum computing and wireless error correction techniques.

Abstract

The use of quantum computation for wireless network applications is emerging as a promising paradigm to bridge the performance gap between in-practice and optimal wireless algorithms. While today's quantum technology offers limited number of qubits and low fidelity gates, application-based quantum solutions help us to understand and improve the performance of such technology even further. This paper introduces QGateD-Polar, a novel Quantum Gate-based Maximum-Likelihood Decoder design for Polar error correction codes, which are becoming widespread in today's 5G and tomorrow's NextG wireless networks. QGateD-Polar uses quantum gates to dictate the time evolution of Polar code decoding -- from the received wireless soft data to the final decoded solution -- by leveraging quantum phenomena such as superposition, entanglement, and interference, making it amenable to quantum gate-based computers. Our early results show that QGateD-Polar achieves the Maximum Likelihood performance in ideal quantum simulations, demonstrating how performance varies with noise.