Design of Puncturing for Length-Compatible Polar Codes Using Differential Evolution

Abstract: This paper presents a puncturing technique to design length-compatible polar codes. The punctured bits are identified with the help of differential evolution (DE). A DE-based optimization framework is developed where the sum of the bit-error-rate (BER) values of the information bits is minimized. We identify a set of bits which can be avoided for puncturing in the case of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. This reduces the size of the candidate puncturing patterns. Simulation results confirm the superiority of the proposed technique over other state-of-the-art puncturing methods.