On the Error Performance of Systematic Polar Codes

Systematic polar codes are shown to outperform non-systematic polar codes in terms of the bit-error-rate (BER) performance. However theoretically the mechanism behind the better performance of systematic polar codes is not yet clear. In this paper, we set the theoretical framework to analyze the performance of systematic polar codes. The exact evaluation of the BER of systematic polar codes conditioned on the BER of non-systematic polar codes involves in $2^{NR}$ terms where $N$ is the code block length and $R$ is the code rate, resulting in a prohibitive number of computations for large block lengths. By analyzing the polar code construction and the successive-cancellation (SC) decoding process, we use a statistical model to quantify the advantage of systematic polar codes over non-systematic polar codes, so called the systematic gain in this paper. A composite model is proposed to approximate the dominant error cases in the SC decoding process. This composite model divides the errors into independent regions and coupled regions, controlled by a coupling coefficient. Based on this model, the systematic gain can be conveniently calculated. Numerical simulations are provided in the paper showing very close approximations of the proposed model in quantifying the systematic gain.