A Low-Complexity Improved Successive Cancellation Decoder for Polar Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces an SC flip decoder for polar codes that maintains low complexity and memory usage while improving error correction performance by adapting to signal quality.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel SC flip decoding algorithm that enhances polar code decoding efficiency without significantly increasing complexity.

Findings

Maintains low memory requirements similar to basic SC decoder

Reduces average computational complexity in the waterfall region

Improves frame error rate performance of polar codes

Abstract

Under successive cancellation (SC) decoding, polar codes are inferior to other codes of similar blocklength in terms of frame error rate. While more sophisticated decoding algorithms such as list- or stack-decoding partially mitigate this performance loss, they suffer from an increase in complexity. In this paper, we describe a new flavor of the SC decoder, called the SC flip decoder. Our algorithm preserves the low memory requirements of the basic SC decoder and adjusts the required decoding effort to the signal quality. In the waterfall region, its average computational complexity is almost as low as that of the SC decoder.