Partitioned Successive-Cancellation Flip Decoding of Polar Codes

TL;DR

The paper introduces the partitioned SC-Flip decoding algorithm for polar codes, which improves error correction and reduces computational complexity compared to traditional SC-Flip, enhancing efficiency for wireless standards.

Contribution

It proposes a novel partitioned SC-Flip decoding method with a tailored partitioning scheme, outperforming existing SC-Flip in error correction and computational efficiency.

Findings

Up to 5x less computational complexity than SC-Flip.

Outperforms SC-Flip by 0.15 dB at FER of 10^-3.

Higher throughput and lower energy consumption.

Abstract

Polar codes are a class of channel capacity achieving codes that has been selected for the next generation of wireless communication standards. Successive-cancellation (SC) is the first proposed decoding algorithm, suffering from mediocre error-correction performance at moderate code length. In order to improve the error-correction performance of SC, two approaches are available: (i) SC-List decoding which keeps a list of candidates by running a number of SC decoders in parallel, thus increasing the implementation complexity, and (ii) SC-Flip decoding that relies on a single SC module, and keeps the computational complexity close to SC. In this work, we propose the partitioned SC-Flip (PSCF) decoding algorithm, which outperforms SC-Flip in terms of error-correction performance and average computational complexity, leading to higher throughput and reduced energy consumption per codeword. We also introduce a partitioning scheme that best suits our PSCF decoder. Simulation results show that at equivalent frame error rate, PSCF has up to $5 \times$ less computational complexity than the SC-Flip decoder. At equivalent average number of iterations, the error-correction performance of PSCF outperforms SC-Flip by up to $0.15$ dB at frame error rate of $10^{-3}$.