On the Weight Spectrum Improvement of Pre-transformed Reed-Muller Codes and Polar Codes

TL;DR

This paper provides a theoretical analysis demonstrating that pre-transformation with an upper-triangular matrix significantly reduces low-weight codewords in Reed-Muller codes and does not increase minimum-weight codewords in polar codes, enhancing their weight spectrum.

Contribution

It offers the first asymptotic analysis quantifying the weight spectrum improvement of pre-transformed Reed-Muller and polar codes.

Findings

Pre-transformation significantly reduces low-weight codewords in RM codes.

Pre-transformation does not increase the average number of minimum-weight codewords in polar codes.

Theoretical confirmation of the advantages of pre-transformation for code weight spectrum improvement.

Abstract

Pre-transformation with an upper-triangular matrix (including cyclic redundancy check (CRC), parity-check (PC) and polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes) improves the weight spectrum of Reed-Muller (RM) codes and polar codes significantly. However, a theoretical analysis to quantify the improvement is missing. In this paper, we provide asymptotic analysis on the number of low-weight codewords of the original and pre-transformed RM codes respectively, and prove that pre-transformation significantly reduces low-weight codewords, even in the order sense. For polar codes, we prove that the average number of minimum-weight codewords does not increase after pre-transformation. Both results confirm the advantages of pre-transformation.