Polar Codes with Higher-Order Memory

Abstract

We introduce a construction of a set of code sequences {C_n^(m) : n ≥ 1, m ≥ 1} with memory order m and code length N(n). {C_n^(m)} is a generalization of polar codes presented by Arıkan in [1], where the encoder mapping with length N(n) is obtained recursively from the encoder mappings with lengths N(n − 1) and N(n − m), and {C_n^(m)} coincides with the original polar codes when m = 1. We show that {C_n^(m)} achieves the symmetric capacity I(W) of an arbitrary binary-input, discrete-output memoryless channel W for any fixed m. We also obtain an upper bound on the probability of block-decoding error P_e of {C_n^(m)} and show that ${P_e} = O({2^{ - {N^\beta }}})$ is achievable for β < 1/[1+m(ϕ − 1)], where ϕ ∈ (1, 2] is the largest real root of the polynomial F(m, ρ) = ρ^m − ρ^{m − 1} − 1. The encoding and decoding complexities of {C_n^(m)} decrease with increasing m, which proves the existence of new polar coding schemes that have lower complexity than Arıkan’s construction.