On Error Performance and Concatenated Coding of Polar Codes in AWGN Channels

Abstract

In additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels, construction of polar codes is needed for every operating signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Recently, the proposal of the design-SNR reduces the computation effort in constructing polar codes. In this paper, we prove that although the BER performance of the design-SNR construction is not affected, the packet-error-rate (PER) performance is degraded compared with the point-by-point construction. Therefore, a concatenation scheme is proposed to improve the degraded PER performance. Results show the validity of the proposed concatenation scheme when employing the design-SNR construction.