A novel bit mapping scheme for high-order polar coded modulation systems

In order to improve the spectrum efficiency of the high-order polar coded modulation systems, the polar code is used as the component code of the bit-interleave coded modulation (BICM) system, a novel bit mapping scheme is proposed considering of the channel polarization and successive cancellation (SC) decoding principle of polar codes as well as the unequal protection of equivalent channels by modulator. In this scheme, the frozen bits on the unreliable split channel are allocated to the equivalent channel with the low protection of the modulator, while the equivalent channels with the high protection are used to transmit the information bits. Thus, the error-correcting performance of polar codes is improved. Compared with some bit mapping schemes, the proposed bit mapping scheme only needs to divide and choose the parameters of the split channels reliability measurement, the complexity does not increase obviously, and simulation results show that the proposed scheme has the better performance under the quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) modulation based on the Gray mapping.