Designing polar codes to minimize the BER of CRC-aided list decoding
David Robert Wasserman · 2016
This paper is concerned with polar codes for FEC. One major advantage of polar codes is that it is easy to construct polar codes for a specified BMS channel. The standard polar code constructions are designed to minimize the FER of an SC decoder. However, there are polar decoders more powerful than SC, and for some applications BER is more important than FER. We ask, can the code construction be tweaked to minimize the BER of a CRC-aided list decoder? This paper reports an initial investigation of this question. Simulation results show that when communicating through a binary AWGN channel, it sometimes helps to use a code constructed for a noisier binary AWGN channel.