Long Polar vs. LDPC Codes under Complexity-Constrained Decoding

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Krieg, Felix, Rübenacke, Marvin, Zunker, Andreas, Brink, Stephan ten
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Krieg, Felix
Rübenacke, Marvin
Zunker, Andreas
Brink, Stephan ten
author_facet Krieg, Felix
Rübenacke, Marvin
Zunker, Andreas
Brink, Stephan ten
contents The prevailing opinion in industry and academia is that polar codes are competitive for short code lengths, but can no longer keep up with low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes as block length increases. This view is typically based on the assumption that LDPC codes can be decoded with a large number of belief propagation (BP) iterations. However, in practice, the number of iterations may be rather limited due to latency and complexity constraints. In this paper, we show that for a similar number of fixed-point log-likelihood ratio (LLR) operations, long polar codes under successive cancellation (SC) decoding outperform their LDPC counterparts. In particular, simplified successive cancellation (SSC) decoding of polar codes exhibits a better complexity scaling than $N \log{N}$ and requires fewer operations than a single BP iteration of an LDPC code with the same parameters.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05485
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Long Polar vs. LDPC Codes under Complexity-Constrained Decoding
Krieg, Felix
Rübenacke, Marvin
Zunker, Andreas
Brink, Stephan ten
Information Theory
The prevailing opinion in industry and academia is that polar codes are competitive for short code lengths, but can no longer keep up with low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes as block length increases. This view is typically based on the assumption that LDPC codes can be decoded with a large number of belief propagation (BP) iterations. However, in practice, the number of iterations may be rather limited due to latency and complexity constraints. In this paper, we show that for a similar number of fixed-point log-likelihood ratio (LLR) operations, long polar codes under successive cancellation (SC) decoding outperform their LDPC counterparts. In particular, simplified successive cancellation (SSC) decoding of polar codes exhibits a better complexity scaling than $N \log{N}$ and requires fewer operations than a single BP iteration of an LDPC code with the same parameters.
title Long Polar vs. LDPC Codes under Complexity-Constrained Decoding
topic Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05485