On the Polarization Levels of Automorphic-Symmetric Channels

Abstract: It is known that if an Abelian group operation is used in an Ar{\i}kan-style construction, we have multilevel polarization where synthetic channels can approach intermediate channels that are neither almost perfect nor almost useless. An open problem in polarization theory is to determine the polarization levels of a given channel. In this paper, we discuss the polarization levels of a family of channels that we call automorphic-symmetric channels. We show that the polarization levels of an automorphic-symmetric channel are determined by characteristic subgroups. In particular, if the group that is used does not contain any non-trivial characteristic subgroup, we only have two-level polarization to almost perfect and almost useless channels.