Design of Polar Codes and PAC Codes for SCL Decoding

The performance of a code under the maximum-likelihood (ML) decoder highly depends on the weight enumerating function (WEF). However, how to compute efficiently the WEF of a polar code or a polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) code is still an open problem. For the design of stand-alone polar codes, we consider enumerating the number of minimum-weight non-zero codewords of the polar code. The block error rate (BLER) under the ML decoder can be approximated as a function of the minimum weight of non-zero codewords and its multiplicity. On the other hand, for the design of PAC codes, we consider enumerating the WEF averaged over the ensemble of random PAC codes. The ML-BLER upper bound can be represented as a function of the WEF. The bit-channel selection algorithms for polar codes and PAC codes are proposed, which take both utilization of the polarization effect and the ML decoding performance as selection criteria. Simulation results show that the proposed stand-alone polar codes are competitive when the block length gets larger. Also, simulation results show that the proposed PAC codes yield excellent performance for a wide range of code rates and block lengths and outperform the 5G polar codes.