Polar Codes: Analysis and Construction Based on Polar Spectrum

Abstract: Polar codes are the first class of constructive channel codes achieving the symmetric capacity of the binary-input discrete memoryless channels. But the analysis and construction of polar codes involve the complex iterative-calculation. In this paper, by revisiting the error event of the polarized channel, a new concept, named polar spectrum, is introduced from the weight distribution of polar codes. Thus we establish a systematic framework in term of the polar spectrum to analyze and construct polar codes. By using polar spectrum, we derive the union bound and the union-Bhattacharyya (UB) bound of the error probability of polar codes and the upper/lower bound of the symmetric capacity of the polarized channel. The analysis based on the polar spectrum can intuitively interpret the performance of polar codes under successive cancellation (SC) decoding. Furthermore, we analyze the coding structure of polar codes and design an enumeration algorithm based on the MacWilliams identities to efficiently calculate the polar spectrum. In the end, two construction metrics named UB bound weight (UBW) and simplified UB bound weight (SUBW) respectively, are designed based on the UB bound and the polar spectrum. Not only are these two constructions simple and explicit for the practical polar coding, but they can also generate polar codes with similar (in SC decoding) or superior (in SC list decoding) performance over those based on the traditional methods.