Novel Design of Irregular Polar Codes for Latency Reduction in Fast Polar Decoders

Polar codes used with successive cancellation decoders (SCDs) provide a hardware-friendly low-complexity solution for a variety of applications. However, SCDs suffer from high latency. A set of fast SCDs has been proposed in the literature to reduce this latency. Irregular polar codes can reduce the decoding complexity and improve the error rate compared to original polar codes. Throughout this paper, irregular polar codes are designed to reduce the latency of fast SCDs instead of improving the error rate. The proposed code design technique can substantially reduce the latency of fast SCDs compared to using original polar codes.