A Polar Codes-Based Distributed UEP Scheme for the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT), which is expected to support a massive number of devices, is a promising communication scenario. Usually, the data of different devices has different reliability requirements. Channel codes with the unequal error protection (UEP) property are rather appealing for such applications. Due to the power-constrained characteristic of the IoT services, most of the data has short packets; therefore, channel codes are of short lengths. Consequently, how to transmit such nonuniform data from multisources efficiently and reliably becomes an issue be solved urgently. To address this issue, in this paper, a distributed coding scheme based on polar codes which can provide UEP property is proposed. The distributed polar codes are realized by the groundbreaking combination method of noisy coded bits. With the proposed coding scheme, the various data from multisources can be recovered with a single common decoder. Various reliability can be achieved; thus, UEP is provided. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed coding scheme is viable.