Systematic Polar Coded Modulation for Informed Receivers

The problem of coding for informed receivers (IR) is considered, where a transmitter multicasts a bunch of messages to its associated receivers, each of which already has a subset of messages as side information. Which receiver has what side information is unknown to the transmitter. A family of polar codes for IR was proposed for binary-input channels in (Huang and Shieh, 2018), which was shown to provide excellent side information gain regardless of side information configuration and content. A trial extension of this scheme to high-order modulations, however, was unsatisfactory. In this paper, two families of systematic polar coded modulations for IR are proposed. In the first family, by building a connection between the message bits and modulated symbols under systematic polar codes, we leverage the bit assignments and labeling techniques such that receiver side information can be directly translated to a minimum distance gain. In the second family, a permutation operation is added before modulation such that the message bits can be properly reordered to further advance and balance the gains among different side information configurations. Simulations show that the proposed schemes provide large and balanced side information gains and significantly outperform the system directly adapted from (Huang and Shieh, 2018) onto high-order modulations.