Joint Detection and Decoding for Polar Coded MIMO Systems

Generally, separate detection and decoding (SDD) scheme is usually adopted by multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In this paper, a novel approach which combines detection and decoding jointly using K-best detection and polar codes is proposed for the first time. Since the generation matrix of polar codes is triangular, polar codes could well adapt to the structure of K-best searching tree. Moreover, the property of polarization could reduce the latency of the proposed joint detection and decoding (JDD) scheme. Based on the joint optimization, the system model is given. For successive cancellation list (SCL) polar decoding, numerical results show that the performance of the proposed JDD is superior to the state-of-the-art SDD. At the frame error rate (FER) of 10
^-4
, JDD outperforms SDD by approximately 2.5 dB for (256,128) polar coded 4×4 16-QAM MIMO system. Furthermore, for half rate polar codes, the proposed JDD could reduce 50% complexity compared to SDD. Results indicate that JDD shows superiorities in both performance and complexity. In addition, the corresponding hardware architectures are also given to demonstrate JDD's advantages and implementation feasibilities.