Abstract:
In 2008, Arikan introduced the concept of channel polarization: By looking at the output of \(N\) copies of a channel from a different perspective, he was able to produce \(N\) new channels whose symmetric capacities polarize to the extremes. Said differently, some of these new channels transmit information without error while the output of the remaining channels is independent of the input. This lead Arikan to define polar codes, which are the first provably capacity-achieving codes on arbitrary binary-input discrete memoryless channels. We will discuss Arikan's original result and, if time permits, some of the subsequent work that has been done.