Abstract:

Ultra-reliable forward error correction (FEC) codes approaching the Shannon limit have played an important role in increasing spectral efficiency of wireless communications. In addition to the error correction performance, both low-power and low-latency decoding are demanded for the fifth generation (5G) wireless applications. In this paper, we introduce turbo product codes (TPC) consisting of multiple polar codes to enable highly parallel decoding for high-throughput and low-latency FEC. With turbo iterative decoding, the proposed polar-TPC can outperform the conventional BCH-based TPC by 0.5 dB, and can approach the performance of the corresponding long polar code within 0.2 dB with a capability of 256-times faster decoding. In addition, we apply irregular polar codes, whose polarization units are pruned, to further reduce the computational complexity by 50% and decoding latency by 80% without sacrificing performance. We analyze the impact of list size, turbo iteration count, and fading channels to demonstrate the potential of the polar-TPC for 5G wireless systems.