Construction and Decoding Algorithms for Polar Codes based on 2 × 2 Non-Binary Kernels

Polar codes based on 2 × 2 non-binary kernels are discussed in this work. The kernel over GF(q) is selected by maximizing the polarization effect and using Monte-Carlo simulation. Belief propagation (BP) and successive cancellation (SC) based decoding algorithms are extended to non-binary codes. Additionally, a successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding with a pruned tree is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed decoder performs very close to a conventional SCL decoder with significantly lower complexity.