Capacity-Achieving Rate-Compatible Polar Codes

A method of constructing rate-compatible polar codes that are capacity achieving at multiple code rates with low-complexity sequential decoders is presented. The underlying idea of the construction exploits certain common characteristics of polar codes that are optimized for a sequence of successively degraded channels. The proposed code consists of parallel concatenation of multiple polar codes with information-bit divider at the input of each polar encoder. Thus, it is referred to as parallel concatenated polar (PCP) codes. A lower-rate PCP code is simply constructed by adding more constituent polar codes, which enables incremental retransmissions at different rates in order to adapt to channel conditions. Due to the length limitation of polar codes, the PCP code can only support a restricted set of rates that is characterized by the size of the kernel when conventional polar codes are used. To overcome this limitation, punctured polar codes, which provide more flexibility on blocklength by controlling a puncturing fraction, are considered as constituent codes. The existence of capacity-achieving punctured polar codes for any given puncturing fraction is proven. Using such punctured polar codes as constituent codes, it is shown that the proposed PCP code is capacity achieving for an arbitrary sequence of rates and for any class of degraded channels.