Symbol-Based Successive Cancellation List Decoder for Polar Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a symbol-based successive cancellation list decoding algorithm for polar codes, improving efficiency and simplifying the decoding process through a recursive channel relationship and a two-stage list pruning network.

Contribution

It proposes a novel symbol-based recursive channel calculation and a two-stage list pruning network, enhancing decoding efficiency for polar codes.

Findings

Requires fewer additions than maximum-likelihood decoding

Simplifies list pruning in symbol-based SC list decoding

Achieves efficient decoding with explicit polar code construction

Abstract

Polar codes is promising because they can provably achieve the channel capacity while having an explicit construction method. Lots of work have been done for the bit-based decoding algorithm for polar codes. In this paper, generalized symbol-based successive cancellation (SC) and SC list decoding algorithms are discussed. A symbol-based recursive channel combination relationship is proposed to calculate the symbol-based channel transition probability. This proposed method needs less additions than the maximum-likelihood decoder used by the existing symbol-based polar decoding algorithm. In addition, a two-stage list pruning network is proposed to simplify the list pruning network for the symbol-based SC list decoding algorithm.