Rate Matching and Piecewise Sequence Adaptation for Polar Codes with Reed-Solomon Kernels

The paper studies rate matching for polar codes with Reed-Solomon (RS) kernels. A low-complexity rate matching scheme, referred to as smallest index puncturing, is put forward with validity proof. To resolve the dramatically increased complexity of reliability sequence generation due to rate matching, a piecewise sequence adaptation method is designed. The method significantly cuts down the computation complexity while keeping a negligible performance loss. Simulation results demonstrate the performance gain of the 4-dimension RS kernel over the original binary 2-by-2 kernel under rate matching, and verify the efficacy of the proposed piecewise method.