An Incremental Redundancy Hybrid ARQ Scheme with Non-catastrophic Puncturing of Polar Codes

The puncturing operation for the polar codes would degrade the capacities of some bit channels into zeros. Considering the impact of the nested puncturing patterns on the information bit channels of the polar code, an incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat request (IR-HARQ) scheme with non-catastrophic puncturing of polar codes is proposed, i.e., we prove that all the nested puncturing patterns in the proposed scheme would not degrade the capacities of the information bit channels into zeros. Moreover, a greedy algorithm is carried out to optimize the transmission order of the punctured code bits. The simulation results show the advantages of the proposed scheme in throughput efficiency and construction complexity, over the existing schemes. This demonstrates the practical value of the non-catastrophic characteristic of puncturing patterns in the design of polar coded IR-HARQ schemes.