Low-Latency Software Polar Decoders

TL;DR

This paper introduces low-latency, high-performance software polar decoders optimized for modern processors, significantly reducing latency and memory use while maintaining throughput for software-defined radio applications.

Contribution

It presents novel low-latency algorithms for software polar decoding that leverage modern processor features, achieving substantial improvements over existing decoders.

Findings

Order of magnitude lower latency compared to state-of-the-art decoders

Reduced memory footprint while maintaining throughput

Effective implementation on CPUs and GPUs

Abstract

Polar codes are a new class of capacity-achieving error-correcting codes with low encoding and decoding complexity. Their low-complexity decoding algorithms rendering them attractive for use in software-defined radio applications where computational resources are limited. In this work, we present low-latency software polar decoders that exploit modern processor capabilities. We show how adapting the algorithm at various levels can lead to significant improvements in latency and throughput, yielding polar decoders that are suitable for high-performance software-defined radio applications on modern desktop processors and embedded-platform processors. These proposed decoders have an order of magnitude lower latency and memory footprint compared to state-of-the-art decoders, while maintaining comparable throughput. In addition, we present strategies and results for implementing polar decoders on graphical processing units. Finally, we show that the energy efficiency of the proposed decoders is comparable to state-of-the-art software polar decoders.