A Low Complexity Successive Cancellation List Decoding Algorithm of Polar Codes
Jiansong Miao, Weijie Li, Xuejia Hu, Hairui Li · 2020
Polar codes are the first provably capacity-achieving novel channel codes. Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithm has a performance close to maximum-likelihood decoding when code length is finite, though the complexity is high. To reduce the complexity of SCL, a partial path expansion with segmented check and pruning SCL (PPE-SCP-SCL) algorithm is proposed in this paper. Based on the successive decoding structure, if the decoding result of a bit is judged to be reliable enough, then a hard decision is made directly and no path expansion is necessary. Moreover, several parity-check points are introduced to perform segmented parity-check during the decoding process, and if the check fails, the current path is directly abandoned. The rationality of the operations is theoretically verified, and numerical simulations also verify that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the complexity of decoding with trivial loss of error performance.