Erasure Schemes Using Generalized Polar Codes: Zero-Undetected-Error Capacity and Performance Trade-offs

Abstract: We study the performance of generalized polar (GP) codes when they are used for coding schemes involving erasure. GP codes are a family of codes which contains, among others, the standard polar codes of Ar{\i}kan and Reed-Muller codes. We derive a closed formula for the zero-undetected-error capacity $I_0^{GP}(W)$ of GP codes for a given binary memoryless symmetric (BMS) channel $W$ under the low complexity successive cancellation decoder with erasure. We show that for every $R<I_0^{GP}(W)$, there exists a generalized polar code of blocklength $N$ and of rate at least $R$ where the undetected-error probability is zero and the erasure probability is less than $2^{-N^{\frac{1}{2}-\epsilon}}$. On the other hand, for any GP code of rate $I_0^{GP}(W)<R<I(W)$ and blocklength $N$, the undetected error probability cannot be made less than $2^{-N^{\frac{1}{2}+\epsilon}}$ unless the erasure probability is close to $1$.