Irregular Polar Coding for Multi-Level Modulation in Complexity-Constrained Lightwave Systems

Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Congzhe Cao, Ye Wang, Stark C. Draper, David S. Millar, Kieran Parsons, Keisuke Kojima, Milutin Pajovic, Lídia Galdino, Daniel J. Elson, Domaniç Lavery, Polina Bayvel

Abstract: We introduce novel irregular polar codes, which extend the regular polar coding by flexible polarization pruning. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed polar codes outperform state-of-the-art LDPC codes, while the computational complexity in encoding and decoding can be significantly reduced by at least 30% over the regular polar codes with a marginal performance improvement.