Performance Analysis of CRC Codes for Systematic and Nonsystematic Polar Codes with List Decoding

Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding of polar codes is an effective approach that can significantly outperform the original successive cancellation (SC) decoding, provided that proper cyclic redundancy-check (CRC) codes are employed at the stage of candidate selection. Previous studies on CRC-assisted polar codes mostly focus on improvement of the decoding algorithms as well as their implementation, and little attention has been paid to the CRC code structure itself. For the CRC-concatenated polar codes with CRC code as their outer code, the use of longer CRC code leads to reduction of information rate, whereas the use of shorter CRC code may reduce the error detection probability, thus degrading the frame error rate (FER) performance. Therefore, CRC codes of proper length should be employed in order to optimize the FER performance for a given signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per information bit. In this paper, we investigate the effect of CRC codes on the FER performance of polar codes with list decoding in terms of the CRC code length as well as its generator polynomials. Both the original nonsystematic and systematic polar codes are considered, and we also demonstrate that different behaviors of CRC codes should be observed depending on whether the inner polar code is systematic or not.