Staircase polar encoding and decoding

The present disclosure relates to data encoding and data decoding using polar codes. In particular, the disclosure proposes an apparatus for staircase polar code encoding, an apparatus for staircase polar code decoding, and corresponding methods. Thereby, a staircase code using non-systematic polar codes as component codes is proposed. Further, specific interleavers are proposed for interleaving matrices between row-encoding and column-encoding at the apparatus for encoding and also at the apparatus for decoding. Three different specific interleavers are presented, which lead to an improved performance of the apparatus for decoding, due to a better error correction probability.