Approaching the Normal Approximation of the Finite Blocklength Capacity within 0.025dB by Short Polar Codes

In this letter, we explore the performance limits of short polar codes and find that the maximum likelihood (ML) performance of a simple CRC-polar concatenated scheme can approach the normal approximation of the finite blocklength capacity. To explore the performance limits, CRC-polar concatenated codes are first optimized according to the minimum weight distribution. Then, CRC-aided hybrid decoding (CA-HD) algorithm with two steps is proposed to approach the ML performance. In the first step, the received sequence is decoded by the adaptive successive cancellation list (ADSCL) decoding. In the second step, the CRC bits of the survival paths in ADSCL are recalculated and CRC-aided sphere decoding with a reasonable initial radius calculated by the newly survival paths is used. The simulation results show that CRC-polar concatenated code with codeword length 128 and code rate 1/2 can achieve within about 0.025 dB of the normal approximation of the finite blocklength capacity at the block error rate 10 ⁻³ .