Polar Codes over Fading Channels with Power and Delay Constraints

Abstract: The inherent nature of polar codes being channel specific makes it difficult to use them in a setting where the communication channel changes with time. In particular, to be able to use polar codes in a wireless scenario, varying attenuation due to fading needs to be mitigated. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no comprehensive work in this direction thus far. In this work, a practical scheme involving channel inversion with the knowledge of the channel state at the transmitter, is proposed. An additional practical constraint on the permissible average and peak power is imposed, which in turn makes the channel equivalent to an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel cascaded with an erasure channel. It is shown that the constructed polar code could be made to achieve the symmetric capacity of this channel. Further, a means to compute the optimal design rate of the polar code for a given power constraint is also discussed.