Puncturing Based on Polarization for Polar Codes in 5G Networks

This paper presents a puncturing technique based on the channel polarization index for the design of rate-compatible polar codes in fifth generation (5G) wireless systems. The proposed strategy consists of two steps: we first generate the codeword message; then reduce the length of the codeword based on the channel polarization index, where channels with the smallest polarization indexes are punctured. We consider the proposed punctured polar codes with successive cancellation (SC) decoder and with Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) aided SC list (CA-SCL) decoder. Punctured bits are known to both encoder and decoder. The Polar Spectrum (PS) is then used for performance analysis of the puncturing technique. Simulations for 5G scenarios show that the proposed polar codes perform comparably to Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes.