An Improved Concatenation Scheme of BCH-Polar Codes With Low-Latency Decoding Architecture

Polar codes have drawn much research attention in the last ten years for their capacity-achieving property. However, their conventional successive cancellation decoding method performs not well at a short or moderate length. In order to improve the performance, concatenation with other error-correction codes has been proved an effective approach, whereas current concatenation schemes using rate-optimized method are too complex to implement with long decoding latency. In this paper, we propose a critical set protected BCH-Polar code with its corresponding decoding architecture. In the proposed concatenation scheme, we only provide extra protection to partial information bits in the critical set, which is constructed based on the channel reliability. For its corresponding decoding architecture, we redesign some components and adopt the Look-up table decoding method for BCH codes, resulting in much degradation of decoding latency. Compared with existing decoders, the hardware implementation shows low decoding latency and high throughput-area efficiency.