Polar Coded Diversity on Block Fading Channels via Polar Spectrum

Abstract: Due to the advantage of capacity-achieving, polar codes have been extended to the block fading channel whereas most constructions involve complex iterative-calculation. In this paper, we establish a systematic framework to analyze the error performance of polar codes in the case of block mapping and random mapping. For both the mappings, by introducing the new concept, named split polar spectrum, we derive the upper bound on the error probability of polarized channel which explicitly reveals the relationship between the diversity order L and the block-wise weight distribution of the codeword. For the special case L=2 in the block mapping, we design the enumeration algorithm to calculate the exact split polar spectrum based on the general MacWilliams identities. For arbitrary diversity order in the random mapping, with the help of uniform interleaving, we derive the approximate split polar spectrum by combining the polar spectrum and the probability of fading pattern for a specific weight. Furthermore, we propose the design criteria to construct polar codes over the block fading channel. The full diversity criterion is the primary target so as to achieve the diversity gain and the product distance criterion requires to maximize the product of the block-wise Hamming distance whereby obtain the coding gain. Guided by these design criteria, the construction metric, named polarized diversity weight (PDW) is proposed to design the polar codes in both mappings. Such a simple metric can construct polar codes with similar or better performance over those based on traditional methods in block fading channel.