Approaching the Normal Approximation of the Finite Blocklength Capacity within 0.025dB by Short Polar Codes

In this letter, we explore the performance limits of short polar codes and find that the maximum likelihood (ML) performance of a simple CRC-polar concatenated scheme can approach the normal approximation of the finite blocklength capacity. To explore the performance limits, CRC-polar concatenated codes are first optimized according to the minimum weight distribution. Then, CRC-aided hybrid decoding (CA-HD) algorithm with two steps is proposed...