Polar Codes for the Deletion Channel

Our research focuses on polar codes for the deletion channel. Deletion errors arise in communication channels with symbol-timing mismatch. These errors are also common in polymer-based storage solutions. Prior studies have introduced a polar coding scheme for a deletion channel with a fixed deletion probability. This scheme is capacity achieving, and its decoding error probability decays exponentially in the cube-root of the code-length.  In this work we have improved this performance: we show that for a more elaborate decoding scheme the error probability decreases exponentially in the square-root of the code-length.  That is, the same decay rate as that of seminal polar codes for memoryless channels. The price we pay for this improvement is a higher decoding complexity which is nonetheless still polynomial to the code-length.

M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Ido Tal.