Multilevel Binary Polar-Coded Modulation Achieving the Capacity of Asymmetric Channels

Abstract: A multilevel coded modulation scheme is studied that uses solely binary polar codes and Honda-Yamamoto probabilistic shaping. The scheme is shown to achieve the capacity of discrete memoryless channels with input alphabets of cardinality a power of two. The performance of finite-length implementations is compared to polar-coded probabilistic amplitude shaping and constant composition distribution matching.