Irregular Polar Coding for Multi-Level Modulation in Complexity-Constrained Lightwave Systems

We introduce novel irregular polar codes, which extend the regular polar coding by flexible polarization pruning. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed polar codes outperform state-of-the-art LDPC codes, while the computational complexity in encoding and decoding can be significantly reduced by at least 30% over the regular polar codes with a marginal performance improvement.