Information Coupled Polar Codes

We propose a new class of spatially coupled polar codes, namely information coupled (IC) polar codes, to improve the error performance of finite length polar codes. In the proposed IC-polar codes, every two consecutive polar code blocks (CBs) in a frame are coupled by sharing a few information bits. We optimize the indices of coupling information so that the less reliable information bits in each CB can obtain more reliable messages from the consecutive CBs during decoding. A decoding scheme is proposed for the IC-polar codes. Simulation results show that the proposed IC-polar codes achieve a considerable gain over the uncoupled counterparts for variable code rates with a slightly increased decoding complexity.