A Low-Latency Decoding of CA-Polar-SPC Product Codes

This paper is concerned with a class of product codes, referred to as CA-polar-SPC codes, where the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) aided polar (CA-polar) codes are column component codes and single parity-check (SPC) codes are row component codes. With the help of SPCs, a decoding scheme is proposed to improve the performance of CA-polar codes at the expense of only a minor increase in decoding complexity and latency. Distinguished from the conventional iterative decoding of product codes, the proposed decoding outputs immediately the successfully decoded columns without waiting for the reception of the entire product block. Only those unsuccessfully decoded columns are further decoded with updated messages from the row decoder by treating the successfully decoded columns as determined messages instead of soft messages. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed CA-polar-SPC code outperforms the underlying CA-polar code over binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (Bi-AWGN) channels with only a minor increase in decoding latency.