We consider the problem of using polar codes with higher order modulation over AWGN channels. Unlike prior work, we focus on using modulation independent polar codes. That is, the polar codes are not re-designed based on the modulation used. Instead, we propose bit-permuted coded modulation (BPCM): a technique for using the multilevel coding (MLC) approach for an arbitrary polar code. The BPCM technique exploits a natural connection between MLC and polar codes. It involves applying bit permutations prior to mapping the polar code to a higher order modulation. The bit permutations are designed, via density evolution, to match the rates provided by various bit levels of the higher order modulation to that of the polar code.
We demonstrate performance of the BPCM technique using link simulations and density evolution for the AWGN channel. We compare the BPCM technique with the bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) technique. When using polar codes designed for BPSK modulation, we show gains for BPCM over BICM with random interleaver of up to 0.2 dB, 0.7 dB and 1.4 dB for 4-ASK, 8-ASK, and 16-ASK respectively.
Channel coding over arbitrarily-permuted parallel channels was first studied by Willems et al. (2008). This paper introduces capacity-achieving polar coding schemes for arbitrarily-permuted parallel channels where the component channels are memoryless, binary-input and output-symmetric.
We show that the performance of iterative belief propagation (BP) decoding of polar codes can be enhanced by decoding over different carefully chosen factor graph realizations. With a genie-aided stopping condition, it can achieve the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding performance which has already been shown to achieve the maximum likelihood (ML) bound provided that the list size is sufficiently large. The proposed decoder is based on different realizations of the polar code factor graph with randomly permuted stages during decoding. Additionally, a different way of visualizing the p…
Belief propagation (BP) is an iterative decoding algorithm for polar codes which can be parallelized effectively to achieve higher throughput. However, because of the presence of error floor due to cycles and stopping sets in the factor graph, the performance of the BP decoder is far from the performance of state of the art cyclic redundancy check (CRC) aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoders. It has been shown that successive BP decoding on multiple permuted factor graphs, which is called the multi-trellis BP decoder, can improve the error performance. However, when permuting the…
Polar codes are a channel coding scheme for the next generation of wireless communications standard (5G). The belief propagation (BP) decoder allows for parallel decoding of polar codes, making it suitable for high throughput applications. However, the error-correction performance of polar codes under BP decoding is far from the requirements of 5G. It has been shown that the error-correction performance of BP can be improved if the decoding is performed on multiple permuted factor graphs of polar codes. However, a different BP decoding scheduling is required for each factor graph permutation w…
$2^m$-ary modulation creates $m$ bit channels which are neither independent nor identical, and this causes problems when applying polar coding because polar codes are designed for independent identical channels. Different from the existing multi-level coding (MLC) and bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) schemes, this paper provides a convolutional polar coded modulation (CPCM) method that preserves the low-complexity nature of BICM while offering improved spectral efficiency. Numerical results are given to show the good performance of the proposed method.
A multilevel coded modulation scheme is studied that uses solely binary polar codes and Honda-Yamamoto probabilistic shaping. The scheme is shown to achieve the capacity of discrete memoryless channels with input alphabets of cardinality a power of two. The performance of finite-length implementations is compared to polar-coded probabilistic amplitude shaping and constant composition distribution matching.
A framework is proposed that allows for a joint description and optimization of both binary polar coding and $2^m$-ary digital pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM) schemes such as multilevel coding (MLC) and bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM). The conceptual equivalence of polar coding and multilevel coding is pointed out in detail. Based on a novel characterization of the channel polarization phenomenon, rules for the optimal choice of the labeling in coded modulation schemes employing polar codes are developed. Simulation results regarding the error performance of the proposed schemes on th…
A practical $2^m$-ary polar coded modulation (PCM) scheme with optimal constellation labeling is proposed. To efficiently find the optimal labeling rule, the search space is reduced by exploiting the symmetry properties of the channels. Simulation results show that the proposed PCM scheme can outperform the bit-interleaved turbo coded modulation scheme used in the WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) mobile communication systems by up to 1.5dB.
We consider the joint design of polar coding and higher-order modulation schemes for ever increased spectral efficiency. The close connection between the polar code construction and the multi-level coding approach is described in detail. Relations between different modulation schemes such as bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and multi-level coding (MLC) in case of polar-coded modulation as well as the influence of the applied labeling rule and the selection of frozen channels are demonstrated.
A framework is proposed that allows for a joint description and optimization of both binary polar coding and the multilevel coding (MLC) approach for $2^m$-ary digital pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM). The conceptual equivalence of polar coding and multilevel coding is pointed out in detail. Based on a novel characterization of the channel polarization phenomenon, rules for the optimal choice of the bit labeling in this coded modulation scheme employing polar codes are developed. Simulation results for the AWGN channel are included.
A commonly assumed drawback of multi-level coding, compared to a bit-interleaved coded modulation, is its high latency: Indeed, the levels must be decoded sequentially. In this paper, we consider polar codes to code each level. We show that the decoding time complexity of the multi-level scheme, using successive-cancellation list decoding for each polar code, is only 1.5 times the one of a single polar code, regardless of the signal-to-noise ratio and the number of levels.
We propose a unitary precoding scheme, namely polar-precoding, to improve the performance of polar-coded MIMO systems. In contrast to the traditional design of MIMO precoding criteria, the proposed polar-precoding scheme relies on the \emph{polarization criterion}. In particular, the precoding matrix design comprises two steps. After selecting a basic matrix for maximizing the capacity in the first step, we design a unitary matrix for maximizing the polarization effect among the data streams without degrading the capacity. Our simulation results show that the proposed polar-precoding scheme ou…
Multilevel coding (MLC) is a coded modulation technique which can achieve excellent performance over a range of communication channels. Polar codes have been shown to be quite compatible with communication systems using MLC, as the rate allocation of the component polar codes follows the natural polarization inherent in polar codes. MLC based techniques have not yet been studied in systems that use spatial modulation (SM). SM makes the polar code design difficult as the spatial bits actually select a channel index for transmission. To solve this problem, we propose a Monte Carlo based evaluati…
A polar-coded modulation scheme for deep-space optical communication is proposed. The photon counting Poisson channel with pulse position modulation (PPM) is considered. We use the fact that PPM is particularly well suited to be used with multilevel codes to design a polar-coded modulation scheme for the system in consideration. The construction of polar codes for the Poisson channel based on Gaussian approximation is demonstrated to be accurate. The proposed scheme uses a cyclic redundancy check outer code and a successive cancellation decoder with list decoding and it is shown that it outper…
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes have been proved to increase the multiple-access achievable rate with respect to orthogonal multiple access (OMA). In this paper we propose a novel communication system that combines multi-level coded modulation and polar codes in a NOMA scenario. Computational complexity decreases with the proposed scheme with respect to state-of-the-art solutions. We also highlight the trade-off between error rate performance and computational complexity.
A hybrid automatic repeat request scheme with Chase combing (HARQ-CC) of polar codes is proposed. The existing analysis tools of the underlying rate-compatible punctured polar (RCPP) codes for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels are extended to Rayleigh fading channels. Then, an approximation bound of the throughput efficiency for the polar coded HARQ-CC scheme is derived. Utilizing this bound, the parameter configurations of the proposed scheme can be optimized. Simulation results show that, the proposed HARQ-CC scheme under a low-complexity SC decoding is only about $1.0$dB away fr…
Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and multilevel coded modulation (MLC) are commonly used to combine polar codes with high order modulation. While BICM benefits from simple design and the separation of coding and modulation, MLC shows better performance under successive-cancellation decoding. In this paper we propose a hybrid polar coded modulation scheme that lies between BICM and MLC, wherein a fraction of bits are assigned to set-partition (SP) labeling and the remaining bits are assigned for Gray labeling. The SP labeled bits undergo sequential demodulation, using iterative demodulat…
The polar codes are proven to be capacity-achieving and are shown to have equivalent or even better finite-length performance than the turbo/LDPC codes under some improved decoding algorithms over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. Polar coding is based on the so-called channel polarization phenomenon induced by a transform over the underlying binary-input channel. The channel polarization is found to be universal in many signal processing problems and has been applied to the coded modulation schemes. In this paper, the channel polarization is further extended to the multiple a…
This paper presents non-binary polar codes for the two-user multiple-access channel (MAC). The bit error rate (BER) performances of the non-binary polar codes with different kernel factors have been investigated in detail to select a proper parameter from GF(q) for the generator matrix. Furthermore, the successive cancellation decoding for the non-binary polar codes in the two-user MAC is introduced in detail. Simulation results show that the choice of the kernel factors has a significant impact on the block error rate (BLER) performance; moreover, the non-binary polar codes provide a better B…
Constructing efficient low-rate error-correcting codes with low-complexity encoding and decoding have become increasingly important for applications involving ultra-low-power devices such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. To this end, schemes based on concatenating the state-of-the-art codes at moderate rates with repetition codes have emerged as practical solutions deployed in various standards. In this paper, we propose a novel mechanism for concatenating outer polar codes with inner repetition codes which we refer to as polar coded repetition. More specifically, we propose to transmit a…
In this letter, we propose a progressive rate-filling method as a framework to study agile construction of multilevel polar-coded modulation. We show that the bit indices within each component polar code can follow a fixed, precomputed ranking sequence, e.g., the Polar sequence in the 5G standard, while their allocated rates (i.e., the number of information bits of each component polar code) can be fast computed by exploiting the target sum-rate approximation and proper rate-filling methods. In particular, we develop two rate-filling strategies based on the capacity and the rate considering th…
A polar-coded transmission (PCT) scheme with joint channel estimation and decoding is proposed for channels with unknown channel state information (CSI). The CSI is estimated via successive cancellation (SC) decoding and the constraints imposed by the frozen bits. SC list decoding with an outer code improves performance, including resolving a phase ambiguity when using quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) and Gray labeling. Simulations with 5G polar codes and QPSK show gains of up to $2$~dB at a frame error rate (FER) of $10^{-4}$ over pilot-assisted transmission for various non-coherent model…
A hybrid ARQ (HARQ) scheme for polar code, which is called active-bit relocation under masks (ARUM), is proposed. In each transmission, the data bits are encoded and bit-wisely XOR-masked using a binary vector before being transmitted through the channel. The masking process combines multiple transmissions together which forms another step of inter-transmission channel transform. The reliabilities are updated after every transmission, and the less reliable bits in earlier ones are relocated to the more reliable positions at the latest transmitted block. ARUM is a very flexible HARQ scheme whic…
A flexible incremental redundancy hybrid auto- mated repeat request (IR-HARQ) scheme for polar codes is proposed based on dynamically frozen bits and the quasi-uniform puncturing (QUP) algorithm. The length of each transmission is not restricted to a power of two. It is applicable for the binary input additive white Gaussian noise (biAWGN) channel as well as higher-order modulation. Simulation results show that this scheme has similar performance as directly designed polar codes with QUP and outperforms LTE-turbo and 5G-LDPC codes with IR-HARQ.
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is one of the key techniques to address the high spectral efficiency and massive connectivity requirements for the fifth generation (5G) wireless system. To efficiently realize NOMA, we propose a joint design framework combining the polar coding and the NOMA transmission, which deeply mines the generalized polarization effect among the users. In this polar coded NOMA (PC-NOMA) framework, the original NOMA channel is decomposed into multiple bit polarized channels by using a three-stage channel transform, that is, user$\to$signal$\to$bit partitions. Specifi…
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) has gained a lot of popularity over the years. Due to its popularity, OFDM has been adopted as a standard in cellular technology and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) communication systems. To improve the bit error rate (BER) performance, forward error correction (FEC) codes are often utilized to protect signals against unknown interference and channel degradations. In this paper, we apply soft-decision FEC, more specifically polar codes and a convolutional code, to an OFDM system in a quasi-static multipath fading channel, and compare BER per…
Typically, forward error correction (FEC) codes are designed based on the minimization of the error rate for a given code rate. However, for applications that incorporate hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocol and adaptive modulation and coding, the throughput is a more important performance metric than the error rate. Polar codes, a new class of FEC codes with simple rate matching, can be optimized efficiently for maximization of the throughput. In this paper, we aim to design HARQ schemes using multilevel polar coded-modulation (MLPCM). Thus, we first develop a method to determine a…
A pragmatic coded modulation system is presented that incorporates signal shaping and exploits the excellent performance and efficient high-speed decoding architecture of staircase codes. Reliable communication within 0.62 bits/s/Hz of the estimated capacity (per polarization) of a system with L=2000 km is provided by the proposed system, with an error floor below 1E-20. Also, it is shown that digital backpropagation increases the achievable spectral efficiencies---relative to linear equalization---by 0.55 to 0.75 bits/s/Hz per polarization.
Although iterative decoding of polar codes has recently made huge progress based on the idea of permuted factor graphs, it still suffers from a non-negligible performance degradation when compared to state-of-the-art CRC-aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoding. In this work, we show that iterative decoding of polar codes based on the belief propagation list (BPL) algorithm can approach the error-rate performance of CA-SCL decoding and, thus, can be efficiently used for decoding the standardized 5G polar codes. Rather than only utilizing the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) as a stopp…
We consider the problem of coded distributed computing using polar codes. The average execution time of a coded computing system is related to the error probability for transmission over the binary erasure channel in recent work by Soleymani, Jamali and Mahdavifar, where the performance of binary linear codes is investigated. In this paper, we focus on polar codes and unveil a connection between the average execution time and the scaling exponent $μ$ of the family of codes. The scaling exponent has emerged as a central object in the finite-length characterization of polar codes, and it capture…
Due to the advantage of capacity-achieving, polar codes have been extended to the block fading channel whereas most constructions involve complex iterative-calculation. In this paper, we establish a systematic framework to analyze the error performance of polar codes in the case of block mapping and random mapping. For both the mappings, by introducing the new concept, named split polar spectrum, we derive the upper bound on the error probability of polarized channel which explicitly reveals the relationship between the diversity order L and the block-wise weight distribution of the codeword. …
Automorphism ensemble (AE) decoding for polar codes was proposed by decoding permuted codewords with successive cancellation (SC) decoders in parallel and hence has lower latency compared to that of successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding. However, some automorphisms are SC-invariant, thus are redundant in AE decoding. In this paper, we find a necessary and sufficient condition related to the block lower-triangular structure of transformation matrices to identify SC-invariant automorphisms. Furthermore, we provide an algorithm to determine the complete SC-invariant affine automorphisms und…
Light nodes in blockchain systems are known to be vulnerable to data availability (DA) attacks where they accept an invalid block with unavailable portions. Previous works have used LDPC and 2-D Reed Solomon (2D-RS) codes with Merkle Trees to mitigate DA attacks. While these codes have demonstrated improved performance across a variety of metrics such as DA detection probability, they are difficult to apply to blockchains with large blocks due to generally intractable code guarantees for large codelengths (LDPC), large decoding complexity (2D-RS), or large coding fraud proof sizes (2D-RS). We …
In this paper, we design and compare multilevel polar coding (MLPC) and bit-interleaved polar coded modulation (BIPCM) for uplink sparse code multiple access (SCMA) systems that operate over fast and block fading channels. Both successive cancellation (SC) and successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithms are considered. Simulation results show that, with either decoder, BIPCM performs better than its MLPC counterpart. Also, both BIPCM and MLPC exhibit a performance advantage over LTE turbo-coded and WiMAX LDPC SCMA systems when the SCL technique is used for decoding.
Wireless sensors are everywhere. To address their energy supply, we proposed an end-to-end design for polar-coded integrated data and energy networking (IDEN), where the conventional signal processing modules, such as modulation/demodulation and channel decoding, are replaced by deep neural networks (DNNs). Moreover, the input-output relationship of an energy harvester (EH) is also modelled by a DNN. By jointly optimizing both the transmitter and the receiver as an autoencoder (AE), we minimize the bit-error-rate (BER) and maximize the harvested energy of the IDEN system, while satisfying the …
This paper deals with two main issues regarding the short polar codes: the potential of FEC-assisted decoding and optimal code concatenation strategies under various design scenarios. Code concatenation and FEC-assisted decoding are presented systematically, assuming a packetized system. It is shown that FEC-assisted decoding can improve frame error rate of successive cancellation decoding arbitrarily, at the expense of some coding rate loss and decoding complexity linearly increasing with the number of codewords in the frame. This is compared with list decoding whose complexity grows linearly…
In this paper, we propose a type of $G_N$-coset codes for a highly parallel stage-permuted turbo-like decoder. The decoder exploits the equivalence between two stage-permuted factor graphs of $G_N$-coset codes. Specifically, the inner codes of a $G_N$-coset code consist of independent component codes, thus are decoded in parallel. The extrinsic information of the code bits is obtained and iteratively exchanged between the two graphs until convergence. Accordingly, we explore a heuristic and flexible code construction method (information set selection) for various information lengths and coding…
Data availability (DA) attack is a well-known problem in certain blockchains where users accept an invalid block with unavailable portions. Previous works have used LDPC and 2-D Reed Solomon (2DRS) codes with Merkle trees to mitigate DA attacks. These codes perform well across various metrics such as DA detection probability and communication cost. However, these codes are difficult to apply to blockchains with large blocks due to large decoding complexity and coding fraud proof size (2D-RS codes), and intractable code guarantees for large code lengths (LDPC codes). In this paper, we focus on …
The joint transmission scheme of polar codes and sparse code multiple access (SCMA) has been regarded as a promising technology for future wireless communication systems. However, most of the existing polar-coded SCMA (PC-SCMA) systems suffer from high latency caused by the feedback iteration and list decoding. In addition, the error performance of PC-SCMA systems is unsatisfactory for ultra-reliable transmission. Inspired by the compelling benefits of non-binary polar codes, in this paper, we design a non-binary polar-coded SCMA (NB-PC-SCMA) system with a free order matching strategy to addre…
Permutation decoding gained recent interest as it can exploit the symmetries of a code in a parallel fashion. Moreover, it has been shown that by viewing permuted polar codes as polar subcodes, the set of usable permutations in permutation decoding can be increased. We extend this idea to pre-transformed polar codes, such as cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-aided polar codes, which previously could not be decoded using permutations due to their lack of automorphisms. Using belief propagation (BP)-based subdecoders, we showcase a performance close to CRC-aided SCL (CA-SCL) decoding. The proposed a…
Recently, a permutation-based successive cancellation (PSC) decoding framework for polar codes attaches much attention. It decodes several permuted codewords with independent successive cancellation (SC) decoders. Its latency thus can be reduced to that of SC decoding. However, the PSC framework is ineffective for permutations falling into the lower-triangular affine (LTA) automorphism group, as they are invariant under SC decoding. As such, a larger block lower-triangular affine (BLTA) group that contains SC-variant permutations was discovered for decreasing polar codes. But it was unknown wh…
In recent release of the new cellular standard known as 5G New Radio (5G-NR), the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH) has adopted polar codes for error protection. Similar to 4G-LTE, each active user equipment (UE) must blindly detect its own PDCCH in the downlink search space. This work investigates new ways to improve the accuracy of PDCCH blind detection in 5G-NR. We develop a novel design of joint detection and decoding receiver for 5G multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transceivers. We aim to achieve robustness against practical obstacles including channel state information (CSI)…
In this paper we propose an enhanced soft cancellation (SCAN) decoder for polar codes based on decoding stages permutation. The proposed soft cancellation list (SCANL) decoder runs $L$ independent SCAN decoders, each one relying on a different permuted factor graph. The estimated bits are selected among the $L$ candidates through a dedicated metric provided by the decoders. Furthermore, we introduce an early-termination scheme reducing decoding latency without affecting error correction performance. We investigate the error-correction performance of the proposed scheme under various combinatio…
A present challenge in wireless communications is the assurance of ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC). While the reliability aspect is well known to be improved by channel coding with long codewords, this usually implies using interleavers, which introduce undesirable delay. Using short codewords is a needed change to minimizing the decoding delay. This work proposes the combination of a coding and decoding scheme to be used along with spatial signal processing as a means to provide URLLC over a fading channel. The paper advocates the use of random linear codes (RLCs) over a …
In this paper, we propose a new class of nonbinary polar codes with two-stage polarization for ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC), where the outer (symbol-level) polarization is achieved by using a 2X2 q-ary matrix [1 0; β1] as the kernel and the inner (bit-level) polarization is achieved by a binary polarization matrix for each input symbol. With the two-stage polarization, bit-level code construction is introduced, resulting in partially-frozen symbols, where the frozen bits in these symbols can be used as active-check bits to facilitate the decoder. The encoder/decoder of…
Slow fading broadcast channels can model a wide range of applications in wireless networks. Due to delay requirements and the unavailability of the channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), these channels for many applications are non-ergodic. The appropriate measure for designing signals in non-ergodic channels is the outage probability. In this paper, we provide a method to optimize STBCs based on the outage probability at moderate SNRs. Multilevel polar coded-modulation is a new class of coded-modulation techniques that benefits from low complexity decoders and simple rate matchi…
We propose a serverless computing mechanism for distributed computation based on polar codes. Serverless computing is an emerging cloud based computation model that lets users run their functions on the cloud without provisioning or managing servers. Our proposed approach is a hybrid computing framework that carries out computationally expensive tasks such as linear algebraic operations involving large-scale data using serverless computing and does the rest of the processing locally. We address the limitations and reliability issues of serverless platforms such as straggling workers using codi…
We propose a belief propagation list (BPL) decoder with comparable performance to the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder of polar codes, which already achieves the maximum likelihood (ML) bound of polar codes for sufficiently large list size $L$. The proposed decoder is composed of multiple parallel independent belief propagation (BP) decoders based on differently permuted polar code factor graphs. A list of possible transmitted codewords is generated and the one closest to the received vector, in terms of Euclidean distance, is picked. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed BPL de…
After the pursuit of seventy years, the invention of polar codes indicates that we have found the first capacity-achieving coding with low complexity construction and decoding, which is the great breakthrough of the coding theory in the past two decades. In this survey, we retrospect the history of polar codes and summarize the advancement in the past ten years. First, the primary principle of channel polarization is investigated such that the basic construction, coding method, and classic successive cancellation (SC) decoding are reviewed. Second, in order to improve the performance of the fi…
This paper proposes a new coded modulation scheme for reliable transmission of short data packets at very low signal-to-noise ratio, combining cyclic code shift keying modulation and non-binary polar coding. We consider non-binary polar codes defined over Galois fields, and propose a new design methodology, aimed at optimizing the choice of the kernel coefficients. Numerical results show that the system performance is close to the achievable limits in the finite blocklength regime.
We consider the problem of coded distributed computing where a large linear computational job, such as a matrix multiplication, is divided into $k$ smaller tasks, encoded using an $(n,k)$ linear code, and performed over $n$ distributed nodes. The goal is to reduce the average execution time of the computational job. We provide a connection between the problem of characterizing the average execution time of a coded distributed computing system and the problem of analyzing the error probability of codes of length $n$ used over erasure channels. Accordingly, we present closed-form expressions for…
