Enabling Fast Polar SC Decoding with IR-HARQ

TL;DR

This paper introduces modifications to Successive Cancellation (SC) decoding for polar codes, enabling efficient IR-HARQ support with significant speed improvements and no FER performance loss, suitable for high-throughput wireless systems.

Contribution

The paper proposes special node modifications to SC decoders that accelerate decoding and support IR-HARQ, enhancing throughput without degrading error performance.

Findings

Achieves 72% reduction in node traversals for length 2048 polar codes.

Supports IR-HARQ with no FER performance degradation.

Enables high-throughput polar code decoding in wireless systems.

Abstract

To extend the applications of polar codes within next-generation wireless communication systems, it is essential to incorporate support for Incremental Redundancy (IR) Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) schemes. For very high-throughput applications, Successive Cancellation (SC) decoding is particularly appealing for polar codes owing to its high area efficiency. In this paper, we propose modifications to SC decoders that employ special nodes to accelerate decoding. Our modifications enable the use of polar IR-HARQ with SC decoding for high throughput applications. Compared to the unmodified SC IR-HARQ scheme, our proposed approach allows us to achieve a 72% reduction in node traversals with a polar code of length 2048. Simulation results confirm that the proposed special node modifications do not cause any degradation in FER performance.