Performance analysis of polar codes vs turbo codes over AWGN channel

Polar codes are a new candidates channel coding techniques for the 5th generation of wireless communication. It is due to their explicit construction with very low encoding and decoding complexity and also they are the first ever provably capacity achieving codes of symmetric binary discrete memoryless (SB-DMS) channel. The capacity-achieving performance of such codes is based on a new concept called channel polarization. The construction algorithm of polar codes is based on the selection of K best among N possible bit-channel at a given initial value of the signal-to-noise-ratio SNR, named design-SNR (operating SNR). Any change in this initial value results in a change of the code construction hence the non-universality of these codes. In this paper we highlighted the performances of such codes in term of bit error rate (BER) for several code lengths and code rates. We compared Polar codes performances in term of bit error rate (BER) with turbo codes (TC), over a binary additive white Gaussian noise (BAWGN) channel.