Distributed Joint Source-Channel Decoding Using Systematic Polar Codes

This letter proposes a novel joint decoding scheme for correlated sources using systematic polar codes. In the proposed scheme, each source independently encodes its message into a systematic polar code word and sends the codeword via a binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel to the common destination, where adaptive cyclic redundancy check-aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoders are employed. During the iterative decoding process, the log likelihood ratios (LLRs) fed to each adaptive CA-SCL decoder are iteratively combined with the extrinsic LLRs from other decoders. The correlation among the sources is exploited to improve the decoding performance. Simulation results show that, in comparison with independent decoding, the proposed scheme can achieve significantly improved decoding performance without increased complexity.