On Enhancing the Minimum Hamming Distance of Polar Codes

Abstract

Although polar codes can achieve the channel capacity in discrete memoryless channel, the practical performance of such codes, especially for the short ones, is still a subject of much needed improvement. The aim of this paper is to investigate increasing the hamming distances of polar codes while maintaining their linearity property. We propose two methods; in the first, the code-rate remains unchanged, while in the latter, which produces superior performance, a modest reduction in the code-rate is incurred. It will be shown that both methods produce enhanced performance relative to the conventional polar codes.