Design of polar coded 64-QAM

This paper is concerned with design of bit-interleaved coded-modulation (BICM) scheme with the use of 64-QAM and polar codes. Since one 64-QAM symbol carries six binary digits, we combine Arikan's kernel with a 3 × 3 kernel to form the generator matrix in avoidance of bit-puncturing. A joint design of bit-interleaver and the polar code is then proposed. The core of the design is to intensify the channel polarization of polar coding by viewing the BICM channel as a set of equivalent subchannels with possibly different capacities. A CRC-aided list decoding algorithm for this component matrix is also proposed. Furthermore, an efficient non-uniform constellation is provided to obtain the shaping gain.