Polarization phenomenon over any finite field Fq​ with size q
being a power of a prime is considered. This problem is a generalization of the
original proposal of channel polarization by Arikan for the binary field, as
well as its extension to a prime field by Sasoglu, Telatar, and Arikan. In this
paper, a necessary and sufficient condition of a matrix over a finite field
Fq​ is shown under which any source and channel are polarized.
Furthermore, the result of the speed of polarization for the binary alphabet
obtained by Arikan and Telatar is generalized to arbitrary finite field. It is
also shown that the asymptotic error probability of polar codes is improved by
using the Reed-Solomon matrix, which can be regarded as a natural
generalization of the 2×2 binary matrix used in the original proposal
by Arikan.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in the IEEE
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