Fault-Tolerant Polar Code Decoding Algorithm for Satellite Communication

As the key underlying technology of communication system, channel coding determines the reliability of information transmission of satellite communication. As a control channel coding scheme in the 5G standard, polar code can realize efficient encoding and decoding of control and instruction information in satellite communications. Therefore, polar code has good performance and potential for development and improvement in satellite communication. As one of the decoding algorithms of polar codes, Belief Propagation (BP) decoding has received a lot of attention due to its high degree of parallelism. Because the high radiation environment in satellite communication may cause the circuit failure and generate errors. In this paper, an accumulating polar code decoding algorithm with hardware fault tolerance is designed based on the traditional BP decoding algorithm. The algorithm realizes the algorithm fault tolerance by accumulating the iterative information of the decoder, and does not need to change the original decoding structure. The simulation results show that under a reliable circuit, the cumulative BP decoding algorithm will not cause performance impacts compared to traditional BP decoding. In the case of transient errors in the circuit, it can improve the fault tolerance of the decoder from 10e<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−6</sup> to 10e<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−2</sup>.