Simplified Successive-Cancellation List Decoding of Non-Binary Polar Codes with Rate-1 Node
Baoping Feng, Rongke Liu, He Sun · 2020
In this paper, one of the constituent codes, Rate-1 node, is used to simplify Successive-Cancellation List (SCL) decoding of non-binary polar codes for reducing the decoding complexity. First, we derive the Logarithmic Likelihood Ratio based (LLR-based) path metric of non-binary polar codes in SCL decoding. Then we propose that the path metric only depends on the LLR value at the top of Rate-1 node tree, which avoids traversing a complete decoding tree in non-binary SCL decoding. Finally, we design a novel reliability metric, which is used to select the unreliable symbols from the LLRs at the top of Rate-1 node tree. By the proposed metric, we select the unreliable symbols to generate the candidate paths, which avoids splitting paths for all symbols of Rate-1 node in the conventional SCL decoding. Simulation results show that the proposed non-binary SCL decoding reduces significantly the computation and time complexity without the performance loss.