Polar Code Design for Nakagami-m Channel

One drawback of polar codes is that they are not universal, that is, to achieve optimal performance, different polar codes are required for different kinds of channel. This paper proposes a polar code construction scheme for Nakagami-m fading channel. The scheme fully considers the characteristics of Nakagami-m fading channel, and uses the optimized Bhattacharyya parameter bounds. The constructed code is applied to an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system over Nakagami-m fading channel to prove the performance of polar code. Simulation result shows the proposed codes can get excellent bit error rate (BER) performance with successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding. For example, the designed polar code with cyclic redundancy check (CRC) aided SCL (L = 8) decoding achieves 1.1dB of gain over LDPC at average BER about 10(-5) under 4-quadrature amplitude modulation (4QAM) while the code length is 1024, rate is 0.5.