Performance evaluation of rate-compatible polar codes using puncturing/shortening

Polar codes are considered promising channel codes for future mobile communication systems. However, the code lengths of the original polar codes are limited to the power of two. In this paper, we employ the existing schemes, puncturing and shortening schemes with relatively low complexity to over-come the code length limitation of polar codes. We introduce an additional variation of shortening method. Using computer simulations, we evaluated the block error rate performance by employing the puncturing and shortening techniques for different coding rates and different puncturing/shortening ratios that produced different performance degradation levels. The Simulation results showed that the shortening scheme, which generated the shortening set from the normal order permutation, could achieve good performance with relatively low complexity.