A Balanced Tree Approach to Construction of Length-Flexible Polar Codes

We propose a length-flexible coding scheme by defining a balanced tree. For an arbitrary code length, we first construct a balanced binary tree (BBT) where the root node represents a transmitted codeword, the leaf nodes represent either active bits or frozen bits, and a parent node is related to its child nodes by a length-adaptive
$(U+V\mid V)$
operation. Both the encoding and the successive cancellation (SC)-based decoding can be implemented over the constructed coding tree. For code construction, we propose a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-dependent method and two SNR-independent methods, all of which evaluate the reliabilities of leaf nodes and then select the most reliable leaf nodes as the active nodes. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed codes can have comparable performance to the 5G polar codes. To reduce the decoding latency, we propose a partitioned successive cancellation (PSC)-based decoding algorithm, which can be implemented over a sub-tree obtained by pruning the coding tree. Numerical results show that the PSC-based decoding can achieve similar performance to the conventional SC-based decoding.