On Design of Multilevel Coded Modulation Based on CRC-Concatenated Polar Codes
Yuki Yajima, Hideki Ochiai · 2020
Polar codes are shown to achieve channel capacity as the code length becomes infinity, and recent studies have shown that the concatenation of polar codes and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes with successive cancellation list decoding can outperform the other capacity approaching codes even with moderate code length. In order to achieve higher bandwidth efficiency by polar codes, it should be combined with coded modulation. In this work, we study the use of multilevel coded modulation (MLC) and multistage decoding (MSD) with the CRC-concatenated polar codes as its binary component codes focusing on the code rate design based on the channel capacity rule. Furthermore, in order to mitigate the decoder complexity and latency associated with MLC/MSD, we propose to replace the codes in the higher levels by simple punctured convolutional codes with Viterbi decoding, demonstrating negligible performance loss provided that the code length is of moderate size.