Beyond turbo codes: Rate-compatible punctured polar codes

CRC (cyclic redundancy check) concatenated polar codes are superior to the turbo codes under the successive cancellation list (SCL) or successive cancellation stack (SCS) decoding algorithms. But the code length of polar codes is limited to the power of two. In this paper, a family of rate-compatible punctured polar (RCPP) codes is proposed to satisfy the construction with arbitrary code length. We propose a simple quasi-uniform puncturing algorithm to generate the puncturing table. And we prove that this method has better row-weight property than that of the random puncturing. Simulation results under the binary input additive white Gaussian noise channels (BI-AWGNs) show that these RCPP codes outperform the performance of turbo codes in WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) or LTE (Long Term Evolution) wireless communication systems in the large range of code lengths. Especially, the RCPP code with CRC-aided SCL/SCS algorithm can provide over 0.7dB performance gain at the block error rate (BLER) of 10^-4 with short code length M = 512 and code rate R = 0.5.