Polar Coding for Fading Channels: Binary and Exponential Channel Cases

This work presents a polar coding scheme for fading channels, focusing primarily on fading binary symmetric and additive exponential noise channels. For fading binary symmetric channels, a hierarchical coding scheme is presented, utilizing polar coding both over channel uses and over fading blocks. The receiver uses its channel state information (CSI) to distinguish states, thus constructing an overlay erasure channel over the underlying fading channels. By using this scheme, the capacity of a fading binary symmetric channel is achieved without CSI at the transmitter. Noting that a fading AWGN channel with BPSK modulation and demodulation corresponds to a fading binary symmetric channel, this result covers a fairly large set of practically relevant channel settings. For fading additive exponential noise channels, expansion coding is used in conjunction to polar codes. Expansion coding transforms the continuous-valued channel to multiple (independent) discrete-valued ones. For each level after expansion, the approach described previously for fading binary symmetric channels is used. Both theoretical analysis and numerical results are presented, showing that the proposed coding scheme approaches the capacity in the high SNR regime. Overall, utilizing polar codes in this (hierarchical) fashion enables coding without CSI at the transmitter, while approaching the capacity with low complexity.