Design of Rate-Compatible Parallel Concatenated Punctured Polar Codes for IR-HARQ Transmission Schemes

In this paper, we propose a rate-compatible (RC) parallel concatenated punctured polar (PCPP) codes for incremental redundancy hybrid automatic repeat request (IR-HARQ) transmission schemes, which can transmit multiple data blocks over a time-varying channel. The PCPP coding scheme can provide RC polar coding blocks in order to adapt to channel variations. First, we investigate an improved random puncturing (IRP) pattern for the PCPP coding scheme due to the code-rate and block length limitations of conventional polar codes. The proposed IRP algorithm only select puncturing bits from the frozen bits set and keep the information bits unchanged during puncturing, which can improve 0.2–1 dB decoding performance more than the existing random puncturing (RP) algorithm. Then, we develop a RC IR-HARQ transmission scheme based on PCPP codes. By analyzing the overhead of the previous successful decoded PCPP coding block in our IR-HARQ scheme, the optimal initial code-rate can be determined for each new PCPP coding block over time-varying channels. Simulation results show that the average number of transmissions is about 1.8 times for each PCPP coding block in our RC IR-HARQ scheme with a 2-level PCPP encoding construction, which can reduce half of the average number of transmissions than the existing RC polar coding schemes.