Cooperative coding scheme using polar codes

Cooperative coding technique combines the channel coding technique to cooperative communications, and guarantees the high performance. Polar codes, proposed by Arikan in 2007, have been proven to be capacity-achieving codes with low encoding and decoding complexity. In the paper, we propose a cooperative coding scheme using polar codes. We present the cooperative coding schemes with amplify-forward (AF) mode and decode-forward (DF) mode, respectively. By numerical simulations, we compare the performance of the proposed schemes using polar codes with those schemes using low density parity check (LDPC) codes under the same conditions. The simulation results show that the performance of the proposed schemes with AF and DF modes has been improved significantly compared with those using LDPC codes. We also study the distance factor on the performance of the cooperative communication system. The results show the smaller the distance between R and S, the better the performance of the system is.