Polarization-Adjusted Convolutional (PAC) Codes as a Concatenation of Inner Cyclic and Outer Polar- and Reed-Muller-like Codes

Abstract: Polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes are a new family of linear block codes that can perform close to the theoretical bounds in the short block-length regime. These codes combine polar coding and convolutional coding. In this study, we show that PAC codes are equivalent to a new class of codes consisting of inner cyclic codes and outer polar- and Reed-Muller-like codes. We leverage the properties of cyclic codes to establish that PAC codes outperform polar- and Reed-Muller-like codes in terms of minimum distance.