Polar Coding for the Binary Erasure Channel with Deletions

Abstract: We study the application of polar codes in deletion channels by analyzing the cascade of a binary erasure channel (BEC) and a deletion channel. We show how polar codes can be used effectively on a BEC with a single deletion, and propose a list decoding algorithm with a cyclic redundancy check for this case. The decoding complexity is $O(N^2\log N)$, where $N$ is the blocklength of the code. An important contribution is an optimization of the amount of redundancy added to minimize the overall error probability. Our theoretical results are corroborated by numerical simulations which show that the list size can be reduced to one and the original message can be recovered with high probability as the length of the code grows.