Hybrid Decoding of Asymmetric Product Codes With Systematic Polar and BCH Codes

Product codes (PCs) are widespread in optical communication systems, especially those that use hard-decision decoding (HDD). Soft-decision decoding (SDD) can bring significant performance benefits to PCs, but the substantial increase in complexity poses challenges for practical applications. In this letter, we propose a novel hybrid decoding scheme for PC consisting of systematic polar code and Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) code, which will be referred as polar-BCH PCs. Utilizing such a special structure, a hybrid soft-and hard-decision decoding (HSHD) algorithm is proposed for PCs, which takes the advantages of both HDD and SDD. Via the iterative decoding, the proposed HSHD algorithm can outperform the traditional BCH-BCH PC by 1.15 dB. In addition, the proposed algorithm can close the gap to the long polar code with the same blocklength within 0.5 dB, while heavily reducing the computational complexity by more than an order of magnitude.