How to apply polar codes in high throughput space communications

This paper describes how to apply polar codes in high-throughput space communications. The high throughput space communications can enable terabit data rate capacity wideband wireless transmissions, and offer service availability of anywhere and anytime. The paper investigates the channel characteristics in space communications. The channels are lossy, time-varying, intermittent, long-latency, and with imperfect channel state information (CSI). In order to make the polar codes suitable for the space channel, some improvements and designs on the polar codes are provided in this paper. The encoding and decoding methods of polar codes are discussed, which are the key to determine the performance. We describe some rateless polar coding schemes that can guide the construction of suitable codes for time-varying channels with no-CSI in long-haul transmissions. Then, a high-rate parallel concatenation scheme of polar codes is introduced, which can improve the anti-interrupt ability of polar codes. Moreover, in order to support the massive connectivity requirements of future space communication networks, polar-coded sparse-code-multiple-access (SCMA) schemes are investigated.