# A Lower Bound on the Probability of Error of Polar Codes over BMS Channels

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method to derive tighter lower bounds on the probability of decoding error for polar codes over BMS channels by analyzing pairs of bits and reducing alphabet sizes.

## Contribution

It proposes a new approach to lower-bound error probabilities of bit pairs in polar codes, improving upon existing bounds under successive-cancellation decoding.

## Key findings

- Lower bounds on error probabilities are significantly improved.
- The method effectively reduces alphabet sizes for analysis.
- Results demonstrate tighter bounds compared to previous methods.

## Abstract

Polar codes are a family of capacity-achieving codes that have explicit and low-complexity construction, encoding, and decoding algorithms. Decoding of polar codes is based on the successive-cancellation decoder, which decodes in a bit- wise manner. A decoding error occurs when at least one bit is erroneously decoded. The various codeword bits are correlated, yet performance analysis of polar codes ignores this dependence: the upper bound is based on the union bound, and the lower bound is based on the worst-performing bit. Improvement of the lower bound is afforded by considering error probabilities of two bits simultaneously. These are difficult to compute explicitly due to the large alphabet size inherent to polar codes. In this research we propose a method to lower-bound the error probabilities of bit pairs. We develop several transformations on pairs of synthetic channels that make the resultant synthetic channels amenable to alphabet reduction. Our method yields lower bounds that significantly improve upon currently known lower bounds for polar codes under successive-cancellation decoding.