Polar-Coded Pulse Position Modulation for the Poisson Channel

Abstract: A polar-coded modulation scheme for deep-space optical communication is proposed. The photon counting Poisson channel with pulse position modulation (PPM) is considered. We use the fact that PPM is particularly well suited to be used with multilevel codes to design a polar-coded modulation scheme for the system in consideration. The construction of polar codes for the Poisson channel based on Gaussian approximation is demonstrated to be accurate. The proposed scheme uses a cyclic redundancy check outer code and a successive cancellation decoder with list decoding and it is shown that it outperforms the competing schemes.