Rate-Dependent Analysis of the Asymptotic Behavior of Channel Polarization

Abstract

We consider the asymptotic behavior of the polarization process in the large block-length regime when transmission takes place over a binary-input memoryless symmetric channel <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$W$</tex></formula> . In particular, we study the asymptotics of the cumulative distribution <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\BBP(Z_{n}\leq z)$</tex></formula> , where <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\{Z_{n}\}$</tex> </formula> is the Bhattacharyya process associated with <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$W$</tex> </formula> , and its dependence on the rate of transmission. On the basis of this result, we characterize the asymptotic behavior, as well as its dependence on the rate, of the block error probability of polar codes using the successive cancellation decoder. This refines the original asymptotic bounds by Arıkan and Telatar. Our results apply to general polar codes based on <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\ell\times\ell$</tex></formula> kernel matrices. We also provide asymptotic lower bounds on the block error probability of polar codes using the maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoder. The MAP lower bound and the successive cancellation upper bound coincide when <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\ell=2$</tex> </formula> , but there is a gap for <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex Notation="TeX">$\ell &gt; 2$</tex></formula> .