Dual Coupled Polar Codes with Successive Cancellation List Decoding

In this paper, we propose a new coding scheme called dual coupled polar (DC-polar) code, which is constructed by coupling two basic polar codes. We present a successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithm, where a list of candidates are generated from the first basic polar code and the most likely one is identified by combining the second basic polar code. For performance analysis and code construction, we derive lower bounds and estimate the performance by the union bounds based on the low-weight codewords. We employ the adaptive SCL decoding for DC-polar codes with early termination to reduce the decoding complexity. It is shown by numerical simulations that the proposed DC-polar codes can attain a near-capacity performance in the short-length regime.