Short polar-coded non-coherent receiver

Emergency communications will be the key to deal with natural or man-made emergencies. Their prerequisites are the short frame burst under limited resources, as well as reliable bit error rate (BER) performance in low signal to noise ratio (SNR). With respect to short codes, polar codes normally outperform Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes and convolutional codes, which makes them more suitable for the emergency communications. However, the traditional polarcoded receiver either has a large discrepancy between the practical receiving performance and the theoretical one, or has high complexity, which limits its applications for emergency communications. Hence, to adapt to such scenario, in this paper we invoke an iterative mechanism into the receiver and propose a new non-coherent detection module, namely, short polar-coded non-coherent detection (SPND) module, as well as its corresponding detection algorithm, namely, outercode-feedback-innercode (OCFIC) BCJR-based algorithm. The simulations demonstrate that, with the condition of non-coherent channel and of the target BER of 10^-5, the performance gap between the noncoherent detection scheme with the proposed SPND module and the coherent counterpart can be reduced to around 1dB. Meanwhile, the SPND module with short polar codes is superior to conventional non-coherent receiver with short LDPC codes, short polar codes and (2,1,7) convolutional codes by 1.2dB, 2.8dB and 3dB, respectively. Hardware implementation of the module is also presented in this paper.