Achieving the capacity of half-duplex degraded relay channels using polar coding

Abstract In this paper, a novel transmission protocol based on polar coding is proposed for the half-duplex degraded relay channel. In the proposed protocol, referred to as the partial message relaying, the relay only needs to forward a part of the decoded source message that the destination needs according to the exquisite nested structure of polar codes. Theoretically, it is proved that the scheme can achieve the capacity of the half-duplex relay channel under the decode-and-forward (DF) cooperation strategy while enjoying low encoding/decoding complexity. Practically, in order to minimize the global transmission power, the optimization of the power allocation is performed between the source and the relay by using information theoretic tools. Furthermore, a joint iterative soft parallel interference cancellation receiver structure is developed to suit to the proposed scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme designed by low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes.