On the construction and decoding of concatenated polar codes

A scheme for concatenating the recently invented polar codes with interleaved block codes is considered. By concatenating binary polar codes with interleaved Reed-Solomon codes, we prove that the proposed concatenation scheme captures the capacity-achieving property of polar codes, while having a significantly better error-decay rate. We show that for any ε > 0, and total frame length N, the parameters of the scheme can be set such that the frame error probability is less than 2
^{-N 1-ε}
, while the scheme is still capacity achieving. This improves upon 2
^{-N 0.5-ε}
, the frame error probability of Arikan's polar codes. We also propose decoding algorithms for concatenated polar codes, which significantly improve the error-rate performance at finite block lengths while preserving the low decoding complexity.