An efficient design of bit-interleaved polar coded modulation

A new bit-interleaved polar coded modulation (BIPCM) scheme is proposed. To reduce the construction complexity, the simplest kernel matrix for channel polarization is adopted. And auxiliary virtual channels with zero-capacities are introduced to adapt different modulation orders. The underlying polar codes are efficiently constructed by calculating the Bhattacharyya parameters of equivalent binary-input erasure channels (BECs) rather than computing-expensive density evolution. Further, to avoid exhaustive searching, an empirically good channel mapping scheme is provided. Compared with the existing BIPCM schemes, the proposed scheme has a lower construction complexity and can achieve a better performance. With cyclic redundancy check (CRC) aided decoding algorithms, the block error rate (BLER) performance of our proposed BIPCM scheme can outperform the turbo coded modulation scheme used in WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) wireless communication system by up to 0.5dB.