Design of Polar Code Lattices of Small Dimension

Abstract: Polar code lattices are formed from binary polar codes using Construction D. In this paper, we propose a design technique for finite-dimension polar code lattices. The dimension $n$ and target probability of decoding error are parameters for this design. To select the rates of the Construction D component codes, rather than using the capacity as in past work, we use the explicit finite-length properties of the polar code. Under successive cancellation decoding, density evolution allows choosing code rates that satisfy the equal error probability rule. At an error-rate of $10^{-4}$, a dimension $n=128$ polar code lattice achieves a VNR of 2.5 dB, within 0.2 dB of the best-known BCH code lattice, but with significantly lower decoding complexity.