Improved Polar Codes for Medium and Low-SNR Regimes

Polar codes, introduced by Arikan, are the first family of error correcting codes that provably achieves the symmetric capacity of an arbitrary binary input discrete memoryless channels with a low complexity successive cancellation (SC) decoder. Due to demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance for a wide range of code parameters, polar codes have been adopted for control channels in the fifth generation of wireless networks (5G). In this thesis, we propose novel methods to improve the performance of the polar code at very low and medium signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes.