An Enhanced Polar-LDPC Concatenated Protection Scheme Utilizing Optimized Critical Sets

Polar codes are a class of coding schemes that have been theoretically proven to achieve the capacity in binary-input memoryless symmetric channels, thereby becoming a prominent research focus in communications research. Although polar codes theoretically approach the Shannon limit as the code length increases indefinitely, their performance is inherently limited at finite-length codes due to incomplete channel polarization. To address this limitation, we propose an optimized critical sets(OCS) selection method specifically designed for error sets within polar codes, aiming to optimize the selection strategy for intermediate-quality channels. Subsequently, a polar-LDPC concatenated protection scheme is introduced, which utilizes the OCS to effectively protect the error set information bits, thus enhancing the overall protection scheme. The simulation results show that the OCS approach exhibits a more precise selection of intermediate-quality channels, resulting in a significant performance improvement of approximately 1 dB compared to alternative protection schemes.