Study of the operational SNR while constructing polar codes

Abstract

Channel coding is commonly based on protecting information to be communicated across an unreliable medium, by adding patterns of redundancy into the transmission path. Also referred to as forward error control coding (FECC), the technique is widely used to enable correcting or at least detecting bit errors in digital communication systems. In this paper we study an original FECC known as polar coding which has proven to meet the typical use cases of the next generation mobile standard. This work is motivated by the suitability of polar codes for the new coming wireless era. Hence, we investigate the performance of polar codes in terms of bit error rate (BER) for several codeword lengths and code rates. We first perform a discrete search to find the best operating signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at two different code rates, while varying the blocklength. We find in our extensive simulations that the BER becomes more sensitive to operating SNR (OSNR) as long as we increase the blocklength and code rate. Finally, we note that increasing blocklength achieves an SNR gain, while increasing code rate changes the OSNR domain. This trade-off sorted out must be taken into consideration while designing polar codes for high-throughput application.