Nonbinary Polar Codes Constructions Based on k-means Clustering

This study investigates an efficient code construction method based on the Density evolution scheme, which has a component of channel merge routine. In this paper, k-means clustering algorithm is proposed for channel merging. By inspecting the merged channels, bit channels are ordered in estimated reliability. Simulation results show that the proposed channel merging algorithm achieves marginal capacity loss of nonbinary polar coded modulation.