Multilevel Polar-Coded Modulation Based on Cooperative Relaying

Polar codes has a better bit error rate (BER) performance than low-density parity-check (LDPC) and turbo codes with lower coding and decoding complexity. The polar-coded cooperation can provide significant enhancement of data rate and link reliability. However, simply binary coded cooperation cannot meet the requirements of spectral efficiency. In order to improve the spectral efficiency, this paper proposes a scheme that combines the multilevel polar-coded modulation with the cooperative relaying system using the decode-and-forward (DF) protocol. We investigate the structure of multilevel polar-coded modulation and analyze the main factors (rate allocation, constellation labeling and decoding scheme.) which affect its BER performance. The simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.