Capacity-Achieving Rateless Polar Codes

Abstract: A rateless coding scheme transmits incrementally more and more coded bits over an unknown channel until all the information bits are decoded reliably by the receiver. We propose a new rateless coding scheme based on polar codes, and we show that this scheme is capacity-achieving, i.e. its information rate is as good as the best code specifically designed for the unknown channel. Previous rateless coding schemes are designed for specific classes of channels such as AWGN channels, binary erasure channels, etc. but the proposed rateless coding scheme is capacity-achieving for broad classes of channels as long as they are ordered via degradation. Moreover, it inherits the conceptual and computational simplicity of polar codes.