Performance of polar codes with successive cancellation decoding over PLC channels

Abstract

Polar codes are the first proven capacity achieving codes for a wide array of channels with low complexity. It is considered a next generation candidate for error-correcting codes (ECC) with turbo codes and low-density parity check (LDPC) codes. The aim of this paper is to analyze the bit error rate (BER) performance of polar codes with successive cancellation (SC) decoding over power line communication (PLC) channels. First, the performance of polar codes in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and impulsive noise channels will be shown. In addition, a signal level limiter is used to mitigate the degradation of the performance over the impulse noise channels. Thereafter, the performance over real PLC channels is investigated. Simulation results show that polar codes are applicable to PLC channels with lower complexity than a turbo or a LDPC code.