Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes using Stochastic Computing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a stochastic logic approach to polar code decoding, reformulating the successive cancellation algorithm to potentially reduce complexity and enhance error resilience, with simulation showing comparable performance to traditional methods.

Contribution

It is the first to investigate stochastic decoding of polar codes, demonstrating its viability and laying groundwork for hardware implementations of stochastic polar decoders.

Findings

Stochastic SC decoder achieves similar error correction as deterministic SC.

Potential advantages include low complexity and strong error resilience.

Provides analysis and methods to improve stochastic decoding performance.

Abstract

Polar codes have emerged as the most favorable channel codes for their unique capacity-achieving property. To date, numerous works have been reported for efficient design of polar codes decoder. However, these prior efforts focused on design of polar decoders via deterministic computation, while the behavior of stochastic polar decoder, which can have potential advantages such as low complexity and strong error-resilience, has not been studied in existing literatures. This paper, for the first time, investigates polar decoding using stochastic logic. Specifically, the commonly-used successive cancellation (SC) algorithm is reformulated into the stochastic form. Several methods that can potentially improve decoding performance are discussed and analyzed. Simulation results show that a stochastic SC decoder can achieve similar error-correcting performance as its deterministic counterpart. This work can pave the way for future hardware design of stochastic polar codes decoders.