Concatenated convolution-polar codes over Rayleigh channels degraded as erasure channels

Abstract

Polar codes have been shown to approach capacity of symmetric binary erasure channels. This paper investigates the performance of polar codes over typical urban fading wireless channels. The wireless channel is modeled as a degraded erasure channel by using an inner convolution code. When the convolution code fails to correct any errors, the corresponding bits are discarded and treated as erasures. We present the performance of polar codes over such degraded wireless channels using different code rates for the inner convolution code.