Frozen bits selection for polar codes based on simulation and BP decoding

Abstract

In the construction of polar code, the selection of frozen bits affects the error-correcting performance significantly. Several calculation-based algorithms have been proposed for general binary-input discrete memoryless channels (B-DMCs) like the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. In this paper, a method for frozen bits selection based on Monte Carlo simulation and belief propagation (BP) decoding is proposed. The information bits are selected out one by one incrementally. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the bit error rate (BER) and frame error rate (FER) performance compared with the conventional selection method, especially in high signal noise ratio (SNR) region. Moreover, the algorithm can be used to construct polar codes with any rate through a complete iteration.