On the Finite Length Scaling of q-Ary Polar Codes

The polarization process of polar codes over a prime q-ary alphabet is studied. Recently, it has been shown that the blocklength of polar codes with prime alphabet size scales polynomially with respect to the inverse of the gap between code rate and channel capacity. However, except for the binary case, the degree of the polynomial in the bound is extremely large. In this paper, a different approach to computing the degree of this polynomial for any prime alphabet size is shown. This approach yields a lower degree polynomial for various values of the alphabet size that were examined. It is also shown that even lower degree polynomial can be computed with an additional numerical effort.