Polar Codes with Memory

Abstract: Polar codes with memory (PCM) are proposed in this paper: a pair of consecutive code blocks containing a controlled number of mutual information bits. The shared mutual information bits of the succeeded block can help the failed block to recover. The underlying polar codes can employ any decoding scheme such as the successive cancellation (SC) decoding (PCM-SC), the belief propagation (BP) decoding (PCM-BP), and the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding (PCM-SCL). The analysis shows that the packet error rate (PER) of PCM decreases to the order of PER squared while maintaining the same complexity as the underlying polar codes. Simulation results indicate that for PCM-SC, the PER is comparable to (less than 0.3 dB) the stand-alone SCL decoding with two lists for the block length $N=256$. The PER of PCM-SCL with $L$ lists can match that of the stand-alone SCL decoding with $2L$ lists. Two hardware decoders for PCM are also implemented: the in-serial (IS) decoder and the low-latency interleaved (LLI) decoder. For $N=256$, synthesis results show that in the worst case, the latency of the PCM LLI decoder is only $16.1\%$ of the adaptive SCL decoder with $L=2$, while the throughput is improved by 13 times compared to it.