Parity-Check Polarization-Adjusted Convolutional Coding

Polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes have better error-correcting performance than polar codes mostly because of the improved weight distribution brought by the convolutional pre-transformation. In this paper, we propose the parity check PAC (PC-PAC) codes to further improve error-correcting performance of PAC codes. The design principle is to establish parity check functions between bits with distinct row weights, such that information bits of lower reliability are re-protected by the PC relation. Moreover, an algorithm to select which bits to be involved in parity-check functions is also proposed to make sure that the constructed codes have fewer minimum-weight codewords. Simulation results show that the proposed PC-PAC codes can achieve nearly 0.2dB gain over PAC codes at frame error rate (FER) about 10-3 codes.