Improving the Performance of Polar Decoders Using Virtual Erasure Channels

Abstract

In this paper we propose the use of virtual erasure channels (VECs) to improve the performance of successive cancelation decoding algorithm used to decode polar codes. VECs are concatenated to the continuous channels such as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) or Rayleigh channels. The outputs of the continuous channels are passed through VECs before decoding operation. The inputs of the VECs falling into a threshold interval are erased. We also provided techniques to determine the threshold levels of VECs. For the computer simulations binary phase shift keying (BPSK) is used. It is seen from computer simulations that the proposed method significantly outperforms the performance of successive cancelation polar decoders.