Polar write once memory codes

Abstract: A coding scheme for write once memory (WOM) using polar codes is presented. It is shown that the scheme achieves the capacity region of noiseless WOMs when an arbitrary number of multiple writes is permitted. The encoding and decoding complexities scale as O(N log N) where N is the blocklength. For N sufficiently large, the error probability decreases sub-exponentially in N. The results can be generalized from binary to generalized WOMs, described by an arbitrary directed acyclic graph, using nonbinary polar codes. In the derivation we also obtain results on the typical distortion of polar codes for lossy source coding. Some simulation results with finite length codes are presented.