Polar Coded Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) Signaling with Symbol-by-Symbol Detection

Reduced complexity faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling systems are gaining increased attention as they provide improved bandwidth utilization for an acceptable level of detection complexity. In order to have a better understanding of the tradeoff between performance and complexity of the reduced complexity FTN detection techniques, it is necessary to study these techniques in the presence of channel coding. In this paper, we investigate the performance a polar coded FTN system which uses a reduced complexity FTN detection, namely, the recently proposed “successive symbol-by-symbol with go-back- K sequence estimation (SSSgbKSE)” technique. Simulations are performed for various intersymbol-interference (ISI) levels and for various go-back-K values. Bit error rate (BER) performance of Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) detection and SSSgbKSE detection techniques are studied for both uncoded and polar coded systems. Simulation results reveal that polar codes can compensate some of the performance loss incurred in the reduced complexity SSSgbKSE technique and assist in closing the performance gap between BCJR and SSSgbKSE detection algorithms.