Feedback Schemes to Improve the Finite-Length Performance of Polar Codes

Polar codes are the first class of codes to provably achieve capacity of binary memoryless symmetric channels with low complexity. However, their finite-length performance with successive cancellation decoding is not as good as other families of codes. In this Thesis, the use of feedback schemes is proposed: in exchange for a moderate delay, the packet error rate is greatly reduced. Performance of the schemes is evaluated in various scenarios, and accurate mathematical models are developed