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arXiv:2204.07435

Performance and Construction of Polar Codes: The Perspective of Bit Error Probability

Bolin Wu, Kai Niu, Jincheng Dai

Published Apr 15, 2022• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Most existing works of polar codes focus on the analysis of block error probability. However, in many scenarios, bit error probability is also important for evaluating the performance of channel codes. In this paper, we establish a new framework to analyze the bit error probability of polar codes. Specifically, by revisiting the error event of bit-channel, we first introduce the conditional bit error probability as a metric to evaluate the reliability of bit-channel for both systematic and non-systematic polar codes. Guided by the concept of polar subcode, we then derive an upper bound on the conditional bit error probability of each bit-channel, and accordingly, an upper bound on the bit error probability of polar codes. Based on these, two types of construction metrics aiming at minimizing the bit error probability of polar codes are proposed, which are of linear computational complexity and explicit forms. Simulation results show that the polar codes constructed by the proposed methods can outperform those constructed by the conventional methods.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2204.07435

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Most existing works of polar codes focus on the analysis of block error probability. However, in many scenarios, bit error probability is also important for evaluating the performance of channel codes. In this paper, we establish a new framework to analyze the bit error probability of polar codes. Specifically, by revisiting the error event of bit-channel, we first introduce the conditional bit error probability as a metric to evaluate the reliability of bit-channel for both systematic and non-systematic polar codes. Guided by the concept of polar subcode, we then derive an upper bound on the conditional bit error probability of each bit-channel, and accordingly, an upper bound on the bit error probability of polar codes. Based on these, two types of construction metrics aiming at minimizing the bit error probability of polar codes are proposed, which are of linear computational complexity and explicit forms. Simulation results show that the polar codes constructed by the proposed methods can outperform those constructed by the conventional methods.
Polar codes are a family of capacity-achieving codes that have explicit and low-complexity construction, encoding, and decoding algorithms. Decoding of polar codes is based on the successive-cancellation decoder, which decodes in a bit- wise manner. A decoding error occurs when at least one bit is erroneously decoded. The various codeword bits are correlated, yet performance analysis of polar codes ignores this dependence: the upper bound is based on the union bound, and the lower bound is based on the worst-performing bit. Improvement of the lower bound is afforded by considering error probabilities of two bits simultaneously. These are difficult to compute explicitly due to the large alphabet size inherent to polar codes. In this research we propose a method to lower-bound the error probabilities of bit pairs. We develop several transformations on pairs of synthetic channels that make the resultant synthetic channels amenable to alphabet reduction. Our method yields lower bounds that significantly improve upon currently known lower bounds for polar codes under successive-cancellation decoding.
Polar codes are a family of capacity-achieving codes that have explicit and low-complexity construction, encoding, and decoding algorithms. Decoding of polar codes is based on the successive-cancellation decoder, which decodes in a bit-wise manner. A decoding error occurs when at least one bit is erroneously decoded. The various codeword bits are correlated, yet performance analysis of polar codes ignores this dependence: the upper bound is based on the union bound, and the lower bound is based on the worst-performing bit. Improvement of the lower bound is afforded by considering error probabilities of two bits simultaneously. These are difficult to compute explicitly due to the large alphabet size inherent to polar codes. In this paper, we propose a method to lower-bound the error probabilities of bit pairs. We develop several transformations on pairs of synthetic channels that make the resultant synthetic channels amenable to alphabet reduction. Our method yields lower bounds that significantly improve upon currently known lower bounds for polar codes under successive-cancellation decoding.
Shannon, in his seminal work, formalized the transmission of data over a communication channel and determined its fundamental limits. He characterized the relation between communication rate and error probability and showed that as long as the communication rate is below the capacity of the channel, error probability can be made as small as desirable by using appropriate coding over the communication channel and letting the codeword length approach infinity. He provided the formula for capacity of discrete memoryless channel. However, his proposed coding scheme was too complex to be practical in communication systems. Polar codes, recently introduced by Arikan, are the first practical codes that are known to achieve the capacity for a large class of channel and have low encoding and decoding complexity. The original polar codes of Arikan achieve a block error probability decaying exponentially in the square root of the block length as it goes to infinity. However, it is interesting to investigate their performance in finite length as this is the case in all practical communication schemes. In this dissertation, after a brief overview on polar codes, we introduce a practical framework for simulation of error correcting codes in general. We introduce the importance sampling concept to efficiently evaluate the performance of polar codes with finite bock length. Next, based on simulation results, we investigate the performance of different genie aided decoders to mitigate the poor performance of polar codes in low to moderate block length and propose single-error correction methods to improve the performance dramatically in expense of complexity of decoder. In this context, we also study the correlation between error events in a successive cancellation decoder. Finally, we investigate the performance of polar codes in non-binary channels. We compare the code construction of Sasoglu for Q-ary channels and classical multilevel codes. We construct multilevel polar codes for Q-ary channels and provide a thorough comparison of complexity and performance of two methods in finite length.
In this paper, we discuss non-binary polar codes using a 2×2 matrix over a Galois field GF(2q) as the kernel. Conventional construction of non-binary polar codes divides the synthesized channels into frozen channels and information channels. Each information channel carries one symbol, i.e., q bits. However, there are many middle channels with insufficient polarization, which cannot carry one symbol of q bits but only i bits, 1≤i<q,i∈Z, at finite block length. In this paper, we consider bit-level construction for multiplicative repetition (MR)-based non-binary polar codes and propose a bit-level construction based on the two following methods. We first calculate the error probability and channel capacity lower bound of each synthesized channel based on the channel degradation method, and then determine both the number and index of the carried bits for each synthesized channel according to the symbol error probability and capacity. To reduce complexity, we also introduce a Monte-Carlo method. We compute the error probability of each synthesized channel carrying i information bits and select the optimal construction that can minimize the union bound of the error probability. Finally, an improved construction-based probabilistic shaping method for MR-based non-binary polar codes is considered. Simulation results show that the proposed construction significantly improved the decoding performance compared with the conventional construction scheme.
Polar codes have been recently proposed as the first low complexity class of codes that can provably achieve the capacity of symmetric binary-input memoryless channels. Here, we study the bit error rate performance of finite-length polar codes under Belief Propagation (BP) decoding. We analyze the stopping sets of polar codes and the size of the minimal stopping set, called “stopping distance”. Stopping sets, as they contribute to the decoding failure, play an important role in bit error rate and error floor performance of the code. We show that the stopping distance for binary polar codes, if carefully designed, grows as O(√N) where N is the code-length. We provide bit error rate (BER) simulations for polar codes over binary erasure and gaussian channels, showing no sign of error floor down to the BERs of 10-11. Our simulations asserts that while finite-length polar codes do not perform as good as LDPC codes in terms of bit error rate, they show superior error floor performance. Motivated by good error floor performance, we introduce a modified version of BP decoding employing a guessing algorithm to improve the BER performance of polar codes. Our simulations for this guessing algorithm show two orders of magnitude improvement over simple BP decoding for the binary erasure channel (BEC), and up to 0.3 dB improvement for the gaussian channel at BERs of 10-6.
Polar codes were recently introduced by Arıkan. They achieve the capacity of arbitrary symmetric binary-input discrete memoryless channels under a low complexity successive cancellation decoding strategy. The original polar code construction is closely related to the recursive construction of Reed-Muller codes and is based on the 2×22 \times 22×2 matrix $\bigl[ 1 &0 1& 1 \bigr]$. It was shown by Arıkan and Telatar that this construction achieves an error exponent of 12\frac1221​, i.e., that for sufficiently large blocklengths the error probability decays exponentially in the square root of the length. It was already mentioned by Arıkan that in principle larger matrices can be used to construct polar codes. A fundamental question then is to see whether there exist matrices with exponent exceeding 12\frac1221​. We first show that any ℓ×ℓ\ell \times \ellℓ×ℓ matrix none of whose column permutations is upper triangular polarizes symmetric channels. We then characterize the exponent of a given square matrix and derive upper and lower bounds on achievable exponents. Using these bounds we show that there are no matrices of size less than 15 with exponents exceeding 12\frac1221​. Further, we give a general construction based on BCH codes which for large nnn achieves exponents arbitrarily close to 1 and which exceeds 12\frac1221​ for size 16.