Flexible design of Multi-Kernel Polar Codes by reliability and distance properties

This paper proposes a new polar code construction for multi-kernel polar codes by design of the frozen set. The new design allows to trade reliabilities of the input bits against distance properties of the code, and thus to trim the polar code to successive-cancellation list decoding. Though the benefits are pronounced for multi-kernel polar codes, the principle is also applicable to Arikan polar codes or other polar codes. We motivate the new design principle, provide a low-complexity design algorithm, and demonstrate the performance advantages by numerical examples.