  We study faulty successive cancellation decoding of polar codes for the
binary erasure channel. To this end, we introduce a simple erasure-based fault
model and we show that, under this model, polarization does not happen, meaning
that fully reliable communication is not possible at any rate. Moreover, we
provide numerical results for the frame erasure rate and bit erasure rate and
we study an unequal error protection scheme that can significantly improve the
performance of the faulty successive cancellation decoder with negligible
overhead.
