Smart Decode-and-Forward Relaying with Polar Codes

Polar codes have recently been proven to be capacity achieving for the physically degraded relay channel and relevant coding schemes have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we deal with the design of polar codes in decode-and-forward relaying and prove that the selective transmission of the relay to the destination, based on the decision of a detector of erroneous decoding - a method which we call "smart" relaying - can significantly improve the error probability performance. Furthermore, we propose a design for the aforementioned detector, that can be applied on the successive cancellation decoding of polar codes. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method.