Variable Quantization for Memory-Efficient Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes - A Heuristic Approach
Muhammad Farooq, Humera Hameed, Muhammad Usman, Ubaid U. Fayyaz · 2020
This paper presents an algorithm to reduce the hardware complexity of the successive-cancellation decoder for polar codes. It has already been discussed in the literature that allocating 6 bits to all log-likelihood ratios instead of using floating point values, can keep performance degradation within 0.1 dB at frame-error rate of 10^-3. It has been shown in the paper that if we allocate different bits to different set of log-likelihood ratios rather than assigning the same number of bits to all log-likelihood ratios, the performance degradation is within 0.4 dB at frame-error rate of 10^-3. The results show that the proposed variable bit assignment strategy can save the processing elements in the architecture proposed by Arikan and it was observed that the bit width of N/2-1 processing elements out of total N-1 processing elements can be reduced up to 4 bits for a block length of N. In summary, this work has established a trade-off between the number of six bit processing elements and frame-error rate performance of the successive-cancellation decoder.