Stitched Polar Codes

TL;DR

Stitched polar codes are a new class of codes that improve reliability and performance over regular polar codes by reconfiguring the polarization process while maintaining complexity.

Contribution

We introduce stitched polar codes, a novel generalization that enhances reliability without increasing encoding or decoding complexity.

Findings

Outperform regular polar codes in various scenarios

Theoretically analyzed weight spectrum and polarization speed

Effective in rate-matched scenarios

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce stitched polar codes, a novel generalization of Ar{\i}kan's regular polar codes. Our core methodology reconfigures the fundamental polarization process by stitching additional structures to enhance the reliability of less reliable information bits in the original code. This approach preserves the polar transformation structure and maintains the same encoding and decoding complexity. Thanks to the flexible configuration, stitched polar codes consistently outperform regular polar codes, effectively solving the performance degradation issue in rate-matched scenarios. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis on the weight spectrum and the polarization speed of stitched polar codes to prove their superiority.