IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 9, NO.

8, AUGUST 2020 1187

Construction and Optimization for Adaptive Polar Coded Cooperation

Hao Liang , Aijun Liu , Member, IEEE, Xian Liu, and Fengyi Cheng

Abstract—In this letter, an adaptive polar coded cooperation

(APCC) is explored in the fading channels. In terms of the
imperfect inter-user channels, the cooperation way of APCC is
carefully designed based on the multi-level structure of polar
codes. Meanwhile code construction with dynamic-optimized
information sets ensures the coding gains at the receivers.
Moreover, the adaptive code rates of two cooperative users are
optimized by maximizing the throughput efficiency. Simulation
results demonstrate the bit error rate and throughput advantages
of APCC over the existing coded cooperation schemes.
Index Terms—Coded cooperation, polar codes, code construc-
tion, optimization.

I. I NTRODUCTION Fig. 1. Coded Cooperation Mechanism.

ODED cooperation (CC) introduced in [1] is an efficient

C mechanism where cooperation is combined with chan-
nel coding to provide the cooperative diversity and coding
gains. Aided by CC, virtual multi-input multi-output (MIMO)
diversity could be created between multiple users using single
transmitting antenna in the particular scenarios. The rate-
compatible punctured convolutional codes, Turbo and LDPC
codes have been used in CC [1]–[3].
Polar codes were proven to achieve the symmetric capacity
of binary-input discrete memoryless channels (BI-DMC) [4].
They have been adopted in 5G New Radio due to the com-
petitive performance and low complexity. Polar coded CC
based on Plotkin’s construction was proposed in [5] assum-
ing the perfect inter-user channel but little cooperation gain
was obtained in the additive Gaussian white noise chan-
nels. For the practical inter-user channels, the cooperation
degree of [5] is very low since non-optimal information set
of polar code is used between the users in the first transmis-
sion stage. Literature [6] explored the polar coded half-duplex
relay system and qualitatively optimized the time-division
and information-division parameters. However, without more
information introduced by the cooperative user, the existing
CC schemes may have low throughput.
In this letter, an adaptive polar coded cooperation (APCC)
for two users is proposed in the block fading channels. In
consideration of the imperfect inter-user channels, the APCC
is carefully designed based on the multi-level structure of polar
codes. To ensure a high cooperation probability and the coding
gains at the destination, code construction by optimizing the
information sets dynamically is proposed. Furthermore, the
Manuscript received December 16, 2019; revised March 3, 2020; accepted
March 25, 2020. Date of publication April 1, 2020; date of current version
August 7, 2020. This work was supported in part by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grant 61671476. The associate editor
coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was
V. Bioglio. (Corresponding author: Aijun Liu.)
The authors are with the College of Communication Engineering,
Army Engineering University of PLA, Nanjing 210001, China (e-mail:
haoliang365@126.com; liuaj.cn@163.com; liuxianliuxian1981@163.com;
tech_cfy@126.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LWC.2020.2984738
2162-2345 
c 2020 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
code rates in APCC are optimized to maximize the throughput
efficiency using the union bounds of polar codes.
II. P OLAR C ODES AND C ODED C OOPERATION M ODEL
A. Polar Coding
For the binary polar code construction with length N =
2n , n = 1, 2, . . . , N synthesized binary input bit-channels
(i)
WN (i ∈ {1, 2, . . . , N }) are derived by recursive combin-
ing and splitting operation on N independent uses of BI-DMC
W. Consequently the capacity of each bit-channel varies from
(i)
each other. Based on each error probability Pε (WN ) of bit-
(i)
channel WN , the most reliable K bit-channels are selected to
carry information bits and the remaining bit-channels transmit
frozen bits typically taking fixed values of zeros. Assuming
that the vector uN = (u1 , u1 , . . . , uN ) is the source block,
the encoding of polar code xN is described by
xN = uN (F2 ⊗n BN ) = uN GN BN , (1)
where F2 ⊗n
 n-th Kronecker power of 2 × 2 kernel
denotes
1 0
matrix F2 = , and BN is an N × N permutation matrix.
1 1
Successive cancellation (SC) decoder estimates the source
sequence from u1 to uN sequentially [4]. The enhanced cyclic
redundancy check (CRC)-aided SC-list (CA-SCL) decoding is
demonstrated to obtain significant gains [7].
B. Coded Cooperation Model
Unlike the conventional three-node relay network, the flexi-
ble coded cooperation framework of two users Ur (r ∈ {1, 2})
is described in Fig. 1. We assume a time-division based
synchronous system. Each user encodes its source bits into
a codeword C. This codeword is divided into two weaker
subcodewords Ci (i ∈ {1, 2}). In the first timeslot, each user
broadcasts its C1Ur , which is received and decoded by the base
station and its partner user. The users check the recovered
information. For the second timeslot, if User 1 successfully

Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Cankaya University. Downloaded on April 07,2021 at 15:05:41 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
1188
decodes C1U2 of its partner, the recovered message is re-
encoded and the second subcodeword C2U2 is transmitted to the
destination over the uplink channel CU1 ,D . Otherwise, User 1
encodes its own message and the additional parity bits C2U1
will be sent. An identical scenario happens for User 2. At the
receiver, the two partial codewords transmitted in two times-
lots for the same user are concatenated and decoded jointly.
Thus diversity can be achieved by CC since the coded symbols
are rearranged between these two users.
In this letter we assume the Rayleigh block fading chan-
nels where the channel coefficient remains constant in the two
transmission timeslots.1 Reciprocal inter-user channels Cin are
considered.
III. C ONSTRUCTION FOR A DAPTIVE P OLAR
C ODED C OOPERATION
A. Design of APCC
Supposing the index sets of information bits and frozen bits
are labeled by AN and FN respectively, according to (1), the
polar codeword is derived by
xN = uN GN BN
= (uAN GAN ⊕ uFN GFN )BN = uAN GAN BN , (2)
where GAN and GFN are the submatrices of GN with row
indices belonging to AN and FN respectively. Let A1 =
{i |i ∈ AN , N /2 < i ≤ N } and A2 = {i |i ∈ AN , 1 ≤
i ≤ N /2}, then we have
 
GA2
xN = uAN GAN BN = uAN B , (3)
GA1 N
where GA1 and GA2 denote the submatrices of GN which
are selected with the row indices included in A1 and A2 ,
respectively. Considering the multi-level construction
 of gen-

GN /2 0 determined by the frame error probability (FER) Pin of C1Ur
erator matrices of polar codes, i.e., GN = , in Cin . Polar coded CC in [5] only assumed the case of perfect
  GN /2 GN /2
GA2
can be further rewritten as
GA1
    directly decodes the received signals corresponding to C1Ur
GA2 G2 0 in the practical imperfect Cin , the first frame C1Ur is seen
= . (4)
GA1 G1 G1
G1 and G2 are the submatrices of GN using the corresponding
row indices in A1 and A2 , and the column indices in {i |1 ≤
i ≤ N /2}. It is notable that the generator matrix (4) of polar
code satisfies the Plotkin’s construction [5], [8] naturally. Let
v = uA1 G1 and w = uA2 G2 , then the polar codeword are
derived by
xN = {v ⊕ w|v}BN , (5)
where “|” denotes that two short codewords v ⊕ w and v are
concatenated into a long codeword of length N.
In the APCC, each user Ur encodes its K1Ur -bit message
into the first frame C1Ur = vUr and then transmits it in the
first timeslot, which is received and decoded by the partner
user Ūr (e.g., Ū1 = U2 ). For the next timeslot, the user Ur
first encodes its additional K2Ur information bits into wUr .
Then, if the user Ur decodes correctly the received signals
from its partner Ūr , the re-encoded v̂Ūr is network coded with
1 For the fast fading channels, it can be proven that CC does not increase
the diversity order if the uplink SNR of two users are equal according to [1].
Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Cankaya University. Downloaded on April 07,2021 at 15:05:41 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 9, NO. 8, AUGUST 2020
Algorithm 1: Code Construction in APCC
First stage:
opt
 AN of a mother codeof length N;
1. Calculate
2. A1 = i |i ∈ Aopt
 N , N /2 < i ≤ N ,
opt
A2 = i |i ∈ AN , 1 ≤ i ≤ N /2 ;
opt
3. Calculate AN /2 of a mother code of length N/2, and
 
 opt 
AN /2  = |A1 |;
opt
4. ΔAP = {AN /2 +N /2}\A1 ,
ΔAQ = A1 \{Aopt N /2
+ N /2};
5. for i= 1:|ΔAP | do 
u[ΔAP (i )] = u ΔAQ (i ) ;
if ΔAP (i ) > ΔA
 Q (i ) then
u ΔAQ (i ) is frozen;
Second stage:
(i)
6. ΔAZ = min {Pε (WN ), i ∈ A2 };
|ΔAP |
7. for j = 1:|ΔAP | do
u[ΔAZ (j )] = u[ΔAP (j )];
additional codeword wUr into C2Ūr = v̂Ūr ⊕wUr , which is sent
to the uplink channel CUr ,D ; otherwise, C2Ur = vUr ⊕ wUr
is implemented using the local codeword vUr of Ur . At the
destination, the receiver concatenates the two frames for the
same user and performs the CA-SCL decoding.
B. Code Construction With Optimized Information Set
In the above CC process, the cooperation probability is
inter-user channel. C1Ur = vUr is always decoded successfully
achieving full cooperation. However, when the partner user
as a punctured codeword of length-N/2. Unfortunately, the
information set AN is constructed in terms of the mother code.
It would result in a catastrophic error probability Pin using
the unmatched AN even at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)
region. On the other hand, assume that the initial information
set is determined by the punctured pattern of C1Ur . Although
FER Pin is reduced so as to improve the cooperation degree,
the destination can not obtain the full coding gain of a stronger
codeword {C1Ur |C2Ur } due to the non-optimal AN .
Motivated by above observation, we improve the code con-
struction of APCC with dynamic-optimized information sets
under the imperfect inter-user channels. The pseudo-code of
construction algorithm is presented in Algorithm 1. Let Aopt
denote the information set of a mother code of length N, which
N
is divided into A1 and A2 according to (3). Note that C1Ur can
be regarded as a N/2-length polar code with information set
{A1 −N /2}. However, a general N/2-length polar code is con-
opt
structed with the optimal information set AN /2 . To decrease
Pin for a high cooperation degree, the information bits located
in ΔAQ are duplicated to ΔAP in the first CC stage. When
the received C1Ur is decoded as a N/2-length polar code using
LIANG et al.: CONSTRUCTION AND OPTIMIZATION FOR ADAPTIVE POLAR CODED COOPERATION 1189

CA-SCL, the original bits in ΔAQ are decoded as frozen given FER threshold ζth of the destination, the optimization
bits naturally. Next, when the partner user encodes the code- policy is formulated by
word wUr with G2 in the second stage, these information bits
4 
duplicated previously into ΔAP are rearranged into the reli- Ur Ur

[K1 , K2 ]opt = arg max Ri Pθ (i )|FER < ζth . (9)
able bit-channels belonging to A2 . In consequence the coding Ur
K1,2 <N /2 i=1
gain of a stronger polar code {C1Ur |C2Ur } is ensured.
It is notable that the |ΔAP | bits rearranged into A2 occupy To obtain the optimized results, the throughput (6) of APCC
some of positions allocated to the additional K2Ur information needs to be estimated in the block fading channels. Here we
bits of the partner. However, numerical simulation demon- evaluate the FER under CA-SCL decoding using the union
strates that the rate loss is less than 0.05 for a code length bounds of polar codes. The list decoder with a large list
N = 512 and overall coding rate Ro = 0.25, and the loss is size (e.g., L ≥ 32) approaches the maximum likelihood (ML)
negligible as the code length gets larger. decoding. The FER is bounded as
In terms of different channel conditions, the overall coding N
rates of APCC are not necessarily fixed. Particularly variable FER ≤ N (d )P (d |γ), (10)
dmin
K1Ur affects the cooperation probability with regard to imper-
where P (d |γ) denotes the conditional pairwise error probabil-
fect inter-user channels. K2Ur information bits added in the
ity, N (d ) is the number of error events of Hamming weight
second timeslot may increase the system throughput. Therefore
rate adaptation is required for a throughput-efficient APCC.
IV. O PTIMIZATION FOR M AXIMAL T HROUGHPUT
In this section we intend to optimize the coding rates for
each user by maximizing the throughput of APCC. For the
imperfect inter-user channel, there are four cooperation diver-
sity cases based on the transmission in the second timeslot. We
list these cases in Table I as well as the corresponding code-
word combinations when decoding for each user. The symbols
“Δ” and “∇” represent whether the user decodes correctly
the first frame from its partner user or not. It is seen that the
case 1 results in a fully cooperative scenario, while the case
2 reverts to the non-cooperative case. In case 3, the destina-
tion concatenates C1U1 with C2U1 = v̂U1 ⊕ wU2 from CU2 ,D
and concatenates C1U1 with C2U1 = vU1 ⊕ wU1 from CU1 ,D
to perform decoding for U1 . Nevertheless, only the received
C1U1 is decoded in case 4.
Assume that Pθ (i ) represents the probability of case i occur-
ing. For example, Pθ (i = 1) = (1 − Pin )(1 − Pin ). The
throughput is calculated by
4
η= Ri Pθ (i |K1Ur , SN Rin ), (6)
i=1
where Ri denotes the reward obtained in case i. Suppose that
the frame error probabilities of CC and no-cooperation at the
receiver are respectively denoted by
Pcc = Pr (K1Ur , K2Ūr , SN RUr ,D , SN RŪr ,D ),
Pnc = Pr (K1Ur , K2Ūr , SN RUr ,D ).
Then, each reward for one user is accordingly calculated as
Case 1: R1 = (K1Ur + K2Ūr )/N · (1 − Pcc );
Case 2: R2 = (K1Ur + K2Ur )/N · (1 − Pnc );
Case 3:
R3 = {(K1Ur + K2Ūr ) · [(1 − Pcc )Pnc ] + (K1Ur
+ K2Ur ) · [(1 − Pnc )Pcc ] + (K1Ur + K2Ūr + K2Ur )
× [(1 − Pcc )(1 − Pnc )]}/N ;
Case 4: R4 = K1Ur /(N /2) · (1 − Pr (K1Ur , SN RUr ,D )).
For simplicity, we assume symmetric CC between the two
users; the users have K1Ur = K1Ūr , K2Ur = K2Ūr . Under the
Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Cankaya University. Downloaded on April 07,2021 at 15:05:41 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
d, and γ denotes the realization of channel SNR variable. In
terms of Pnc , P (d |γUr ,D ) = Q( 2d γUr ,D ), where Q(x) is
the Gaussian Q-function. As for Pcc , P (d |γUr ,D , γŪr ,D ) =
Q( 2d1 γUr ,D + 2d2 γŪr ,D ), d1 and d2 are the portions
for the error event bits transmitted through U1 ’s and U2 ’s
channels, respectively, such that d1 + d2 = d . Pin and
Pr (K1Ur , SN RUr ,D ) of case 4 are evaluated similarly with
the code length N/2.
Using the evaluated FER bounds in four cases, the maximal
attainable throughput bound and the optimized K1Ur , K2Ur can
be derived. For the scenario of perfect Cin (full cooperation),
only case 1 is reserved. The throughput optimization is formu-
lated by the one-dimensional search of (Ko = K1Ur +K2Ūr ). In
the imperfect Cin , the two-dimension optimization problem is
solved. Fortunately efficient search algorithms such as golden-
section search method [9] can be employed. In addition, if
K1Ur and K2Ur change by the same searching step, large
amounts of calculation for Pnc , Pcc and R1 , R2 will be omit-
ted since they are only affected by the sum Ko . The optimized
results can be calculated offline in practice and stored in tables
at the terminals.
V. S IMULATION AND A NALYSIS
We implement coded cooperation using the polar codes with
length N = 512, Ro = 1/4 in the Rayleigh block fading
channels. The fading factors are with average power gain
E[hi 2 ] = 1; the Gaussian noise has zero mean and variance
(7) σ 2 . The users have statistically equal uplink channels. The
CA-SCL decoder is used with embedded 16-bit CRC and list
(8) size L = 32. For the analysis we assume perfect error detection
and channel state estimation.
Fig. 2 presents the bit error rate (BER) performance of
APCC at the destination under Cin of various qualities (10dB,
20dB, perfect). Other CC schemes of polar [5] and LDPC [3]
codes are presented in Fig. 2 using the same code length and
overall rate as APCC, for fair comparison. It is seen that the
polar-CC in [5] fails to achieve obvious cooperation diver-
sity when the inter-user channels are imperfect. The BER
performance is just similar to the no-cooperation case although
SNR in increases to 20 dB. That is because the effective code
construction between the users are neglected leading to bad
cooperation degree. However, the improved APCC not only
ensures a high cooperation probability but concatenates the
two frames into a stronger polar code. We can find that APCC
1190
TABLE I
F OUR C OOPERATION D IVERSITY C ASES AND C ODE C OMBINATION IN THE D ECODING
Fig. 2. BER results of different CC schemes versus the average SNR at the
base station, both users have equal SNR over the block fading channel.
obtains a gain of 6-8 dB in the block fading channels com-
pared to the polar-CC. As the quality of Cin is enhanced, the
BER of APCC approaches the performance of full cooperation.
Additionally a coded cooperation scheme was proposed in [3]
based on extended LDPC codes (termed LDPC-CC), where
the codewords of two stages were combined into a long one
incrementally. The proposed APCC outperforms the LDPC-
CC under both perfect and same practical inter-user channel
conditions.
In Fig. 3, we show the maximal attainable throughput of
APCC using the calculation and optimization formulations in
Section IV. The throughput results of LDPC-CC with various
coding rates are also provided for comparison. The distance
spectra N (d) is calculated via computer enumeration, includ-
ing the partitioning of the Hamming weight d into d1 and
d2 for the full cooperation case. The evaluated throughput
bound is derived by employing the upper union bounds of
polar codes. It is found that the bound is tight and matches
with the simulated results at high average SNR range. Since
APCC allows the information numbers of two stages to be
adjusted flexibly, the resulted throughput increases when the
channel condition is improved. On the other hand, the through-
put of imperfect (18-dB) Cin is slightly higher than that of
perfect Cin , since we optimize the overall throughput of four
cases presented in Table I. Especially the self-decoded C1Ur
in case 3 or 4 can contribute to the throughput reward. In
terms of the corresponding results of LDPC-CC, note that the
throughput only converges to 0.5 or 0.7 at high SNRs which
is the fixed code rate of the first transmission set in the first
cooperation phase. It is concluded that our APCC is a more
throughput-efficient cooperation way.
Authorized licensed use limited to: ULAKBIM UASL - Cankaya University. Downloaded on April 07,2021 at 15:05:41 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
IEEE WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 9, NO. 8, AUGUST 2020
Fig. 3. Attainable throughput of APCC and LDPC-CC vs. the received SNR,
under perfect and 18-dB Cin .
VI. C ONCLUSION
This letter proposes a new coded cooperation scheme
using polar codes. The improved code construction in APCC
increases the cooperation degree of the users and ensures
the coding gain of a stronger polar code at the destination.
The code rates of two cooperative users are optimized with
maximal attainable throughput. Based on the proposed APCC
construction and optimization, the upcoming extensions of this
letter will include the mutually independent inter-user channels
and multi-user scenarios.
R EFERENCES
[1] T. Hunter and A. Nosratinia, “Diversity through coded cooperation,” IEEE
Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 283–289, Feb. 2006.
[2] B. Zhao and M. C. Valenti, “Distributed turbo coded diversity for relay
channel,” Electron. Lett., vol. 39, no. 10, pp. 786–787, 2003.
[3] A. Hussain and M. Kousa, “Extended low-density parity-check codes
for feedback-based cooperative diversity schemes,” IET Commun., vol. 8,
no. 6, pp. 805–812, 2014.
[4] E. Arikan, “Channel polarization: A method for constructing capacity-
achieving codes for symmetric binary-input memoryless channels,” IEEE
Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 3051–3073, Jul. 2009.
[5] S. Ejaz, F. Yang, and T. H. Soliman, “Network polar coded coopera-
tion with joint SC decoding,” Electron. Lett., vol. 51, no. 9, pp. 695–697,
2015.
[6] Q. Zhan, M. Du, Y. Wang, and F. Zhou, “Half-duplex relay systems based
on polar codes,” IET Commun., vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 433–440, 2014.
[7] K. Niu and K. Chen, “CRC-aided decoding of polar codes,” IEEE
Commun. Lett., vol. 16, no. 10, pp. 1668–1671, Oct. 2012.
[8] M. Plotkin, “Binary codes with specified minimum distance,” IRE Trans.
Inf. Theory, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 445–450, 1960.
[9] H. Khoshnevis, I. Marsland, and H. Yanikomeroglu, “Throughput-based
design for polar coded-modulation,” IEEE Trans. Comm., vol. 67, no. 3,
pp. 1770–1782, Mar. 2019.