A Simple Relaxation Scheme for Polar Codes

In this paper, a simple relaxation scheme to reduce the encoding and decoding complexity of polar codes is introduced. Unlike the conventional relaxation schemes, the proposed technique relies on selecting relevant encoding/decoding nodes based on initialized relaxation attribute values and their extension to the remainder of the encoder and decoder stages. We show that the proposed relaxation scheme provides comparable BLER performance to the conventional polar codes by numerical simulations, while having significant complexity reduction.