Channel Polarization: A Method for Constructing Capacity-Achieving Codes for Symmetric Binary-Input Memoryless Channels
Author: Erdal Arıkan Publication: IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 2009 Link: IEEE Xplore This paper introduces polar codes, the first explicit and efficient code construction that achieves Shannon capacity for binary-input symmetric memoryless channels. The main idea is channel polarization: by combining channels with a simple linear transform and applying the process recursively, one produces synthetic sub-channels that become either nearly perfect (capacity ≈ 1) or nearly useless (capacity ≈ 0)- hence the term polarization. ...