Bit-interleaved polar-coded modulation

A polar coding scheme for bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is proposed. Code construction is performed by extending Arikan´s heuristic to parallel channels. A lower-complexity and numerically robust implementation of list decoding with cyclic redundancy check is adopted. The performance of the design methods used for the construction of proposed bit-interleaved polar coded modulation (BIPCM) system is evaluated over 16-ary quadrature-amplitude modulation with different mapping schemes. It is shown that the proposed BIPCM architecture provides significant performance advantages over the BICM schemes implemented with other well-known codes for moderate block lengths.