A novel rate-adaptive distributed source coding scheme using polar codes

In this paper, we propose a rate-adaptive distributed source coding (DSC) scheme for two correlated sources using polar codes. We change the rule of selecting new frozen bits when the decoder requests more information. In our scheme, new frozen bits are chosen according to successive cancellation (SC) decoding instead of Bhattacharyya parameter. On receipt of a new frozen bit, SC decoding will continue from the new bit rather than restart from the first one. The novel scheme eliminates the recalculation of the previously decoded bits while reaching a competitive compression rates compared with alternatives. Furthermore, we derive a method for computing the average compression rates of the schemes in this paper, which match with the simulation results properly. Analysis shows that our novel scheme can reduce the decoding complexity significantly.