Low Latency Decoder for Short Blocklength Polar Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces new algorithms for low latency decoding of short blocklength polar codes, achieving up to 27% latency reduction without significant performance loss by processing certain nodes in parallel.

Contribution

The paper proposes novel algorithms for processing specific node patterns in simplified SC decoding, enabling parallel processing and reducing latency in short polar codes.

Findings

Up to 13% latency reduction with no performance loss.

Up to 27% latency reduction with minor performance degradation.

Effective parallel processing of node patterns in pruned decoding trees.

Abstract

Polar codes have been gaining a lot of interest due to it being the first coding scheme to provably achieve the symmetric capacity of a binary memoryless channel with an explicit construction. However, the main drawback of polar codes is the low throughput of its successive cancellation (SC) decoding. Simplified SC decoding algorithms of polar codes can be used to reduce the latency of the polar decode by faster processing of specific sub-codes in the polar code. By combining simplified SC with a list decoding technique, such as SC list (SCL) decoding, polar codes can cater to the two conflicting requirements of high reliability and low latency in ultra-reliable low-latency (URLLC) communication systems. Simplified SC algorithm recognizes some special nodes in the SC decoding tree, corresponding to the specific subcodes in the polar code construction, and efficiently prunes the SC decoding tree, without traversing the sub-trees and computing log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) for each child node. However, this decoding process still suffers from the latency associated with the serial nature of SC decoding. We propose some new algorithms to process new types of node patterns that appear within multiple levels of pruned sub-trees and it enables to process of certain nodes in parallel. In short blocklength polar codes, our proposed algorithm can achieve up to $13\%$ latency reduction from fast-simplified SC \cite{Sarkis2013} without any performance degradation. Furthermore, it can achieve up to $27\%$ latency reduction if small error-correcting performance degradation is allowed.