Partially Information Coupled Bit-Interleaved Polar Coded Modulation

In this paper, we propose partially information coupled bit-interleaved polar coded modulation (PIC-BIPCM), which is a class of spatially coupled polar coding schemes designed for $2^{Q}$ -ary modulations. Specifically, we consider PIC-BIPCM schemes respectively constructed with three BIPCM schemes: direct BIPCM, punctured BIPCM, and multi-kernel BIPCM. We analyze the error performance of the proposed PIC-BIPCM over the binary erasure channel (BEC) via density evolution. With the analysis as a guideline, we jointly design the positions of coupled bits and the modulation bit-mapper by taking into account the partial polarization of finite length polar codes as well as the unequal error protection of high order modulations. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement of the proposed PIC-BIPCM over the uncoupled BIPCM on both BEC and AWGN channels.