# A Method for Low Complexity Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-complexity method for Successive Cancellation List decoding of polar codes that significantly reduces sorting complexity with minimal performance loss, making it more practical for 5G applications.

## Contribution

The paper proposes a novel approach to reduce sorting complexity in SCL decoders by decreasing input elements, achieving up to 95% smaller sorter size without performance degradation.

## Key findings

- Up to 95% reduction in sorter size.
- Negligible performance loss.
- Applicable to 5G polar code decoding.

## Abstract

Polar codes have attracted a lot of attention during past few years and have been adopted as a coding scheme for 5G standard. Successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoder provides high level error-correction performance for polar codes, but the implementation complexity grows rapidly with the increase of the list size. Since the computation cost of sorting, many works focus on reducing the sorting complexity for SCL decoder. In this paper, we propose a method for SCL which directly reduce the number of input elements of sorting network without performance loss. Compared with SCL decoder, the proposed method has up to 95\% less sorter size on average, and the performance loss is negligible.