Hybrid Bucket Sorting Method for Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes
Jiahao Wang, Zhenyu Hu, Ning An, YE Dun-fan · IEEE Communications Letters · 2019
This letter focuses on the path metric sorting of successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder for polar codes. The metric sorter is a major challenge of SCL decoder in terms of overall latency. We propose a hybrid bucket sorting method to select L unordered paths with the smallest metrics out of the 2L paths. Each hybrid bucket sorter (HBS) consists of an optimized bucket sorter and a half cleaner. Evaluation results indicate that the HBS outperforms state-of-the-art metric sorters in terms of latency reduction.