Conditions for Robustness of Polar Codes in the Presence of Channel Mismatch

A challenging problem related to the design of polar codes is “robustness against channel parameter variations” as stated in Arıkan’s original work. In this paper, we describe how the problem of robust polar code design can be viewed as a mismatch decoding problem. We propose conditions which ensure a polar encoder/decoder designed for a mismatched B-DMC can be used to communicate reliably. In particular, the analysis shows that the original polar code construction method is robust over the class of binary symmetric channels.