Abstract-An efficient algorithm for the construction of polar codes for higher-order modulation is presented based on information-theoretic principles. The bit reliabilities after successive demapping are estimated using the LM-rate, an achievable rate for mismatched decoding. The successive demapper bit channels are then replaced by binary input Additive White Gaussian Noise (biAWGN) surrogate channels and polar codes are constructed using the Gaussian approximation (GA). This LM-rate Demapper GA (LM-DGA) construction is used to construct polar codes for several demapping strategies proposed in literature. For all considered demappers, the LM-DGA constructed polar codes have the same performance as polar codes constructed by Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. The proposed LM-DGA construction is much faster than the MC construction. For 64-QAM, spectral efficiency 3 bits/s/Hz, and block length 1536 bits, simulation results show that LM-DGA constructed polar codes with cyclic redundancy check and successive cancellation list decoding are 1 dB more power efficient than state-of-the-art AR4JA lowdensity parity-check codes.

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Polar codes based on 2 × 2 non-binary kernels are discussed in this work. The kernel over GF(q) is selected by maximizing the polarization effect and using Monte-Carlo simulation. Belief propagation (BP) and successive cancellation (SC) based decoding algorithms are extended to non-binary codes. Additionally, a successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding with a pruned tree is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed decoder performs very close to a conventional SCL decoder with significantly lower complexity.

BMERA or convolutional polar codes are an extension of polar codes with a provably better error exponent than polar codes. A successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm for BMERA codes similar to SC polar decoders is introduced. A pseudocode description of the SC decoder that can be extended to SC list (SCL) decoding is provided. Simulation results with and without outer CRC codes under SC and SCL decoding are presented for QAM modulation over the AWGN channel to compare the performance of polar and BMERA codes. BMERA codes outperform polar codes by more than 0.5 dB under SCL decoding without outer CRC codes.

The probabilistic shaping scheme from Honda and Yamamoto (2013) for polar codes is used to enable power-efficient signaling for on-off keying (OOK). As OOK has a non-symmetric optimal input distribution, shaping approaches that are based on the concatenation of a distribution matcher followed by systematic encoding do not result in optimal signaling. Instead, these approaches represent a time sharing scheme where only a fraction of the codeword symbols is shaped. The proposed scheme uses a polar code for joint distribution matching and forward error correction which enables asymptotically optimal signaling. Numerical simulations show a gain of 1.8 dB compared to uniform transmission at a spectral efficiency of 0.25 bits/channel use for a blocklength of 65,536 bits.