A Lightweight Encoder and Decoder for Non-Binary Polar Codes

In this paper, we associate the Cyclic Code-Shift Keying (CCSK) modulation to Non-Binary Polar (NB-Polar) codes to have good decoding performance at ultra-low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We show that the kernel transformation of order 2 using kernel coefficients equal to 1 reduces the complexity of the encoder and decoder and does not degrade error-correcting performance. We consider the Successive-Cancellation Min-Sum (SC-MS) decoder. To greatly reduce the complexity of the SC- MS decoder, we choose a small number of most meaningful values at the check node processing. Our simulation results show that the optimized SC- MS decoder presents a negligible performance degradation with respect to the SC decoder.