Extension of the Poltyrev Bound to Binary Memoryless Symmetric Channels

The Poltyrev bound provides a very tight upper bound on the decoding error probability when using binary linear codes for transmission over the binary symmetric channel and the additive white Gaussian noise channel, making use of the code’s weight spectrum. In the present work, the bound is extended to memoryless symmetric channels with a discrete output alphabet. The derived bound is demonstrated on a hybrid BSC-BEC channel. Additionally, a reduced-complexity bound is introduced at the cost of some loss in tightness.