Polar-code-based information reconciliation scheme with the frozen-bit erasure strategy for quantum key distribution

Information reconciliation (IR) ensures the correctness of quantum key distribution systems by correcting the error bits that existed in the sifted keys. In this article, we propose a polar-code-based IR scheme with the frozen-bit erasure strategy, where an equivalent transmission of sifted keys is conducted so that each frozen bit in the decoding procedure is erased to zero. Thus, our IR scheme is no longer limited by the assumption of true random numbers and can be implemented simply and efficiently. Furthermore, we implement the proposed IR scheme with the fast simplified successive-cancellation list decoder and its throughput reaches 0.68 Mbps with the yield of 0.8333; when the decoder list size is 16, the block size is 1 Mb and the quantum bit error rate is 0.02.