A Rate-Matching Concatenation Scheme of Polar Codes With Outer Reed-Solomon Codes

Abstract

As a hybrid solution, RS-polar codes inherit the low encoding and decoding complexity of polar codes as well as the superior burst error-correction capability of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes. However, their code rates are limited by the inner polar codes and the outer RS codes’ rate. In this letter, we present an average distributed puncturing (ADP) method and combine it with RS-polar codes to construct the rate matching scheme which can combine the advantages of concatenated codes and puncturing codes to better improve block performance and flexibility. To improve the puncturing performance, a power-level segmentation puncturing (PLSP) algorithm is proposed that can reserve a higher number of high reliability channels after puncturing. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the conventional algorithms at the low code rate and small transmission length. Especially, under the RS-polar scheme, the PLSP algorithm can provide over 1.32 dB performance gain at the block error rate (BLER) of $10^{-3}$ with code length M = 2400 and code rate r’ = 1/3 compared with the quasi-uniform puncturing (QUP) algorithm.