Non-Binary Polar Codes for Spread-Spectrum Modulations

This paper proposes a new coded modulation scheme for reliable transmission of short data packets at very low signal-to-noise ratio, combining cyclic code shift keying modulation and non-binary polar coding. We consider non-binary polar codes defined over Galois fields, and propose a new design methodology, aimed at optimizing the choice of the kernel coefficients. Numerical results show that the system performance is close to the achievable limits in the finite blocklength regime.