Ordered Reliability Bits Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding

TL;DR

Ordered Reliability Bits GRAND is a soft-detection decoding algorithm for short, high-rate codes that achieves high accuracy with minimal soft information and outperforms existing decoders in block error rate.

Contribution

It introduces ORBGRAND, a soft-detection variant of GRAND that efficiently decodes various short, high-rate codes using limited soft information and is suitable for parallel hardware implementation.

Findings

ORBGRAND achieves similar error performance across different code classes.

ORBGRAND outperforms CA-SCL in block error rate.

The algorithm maintains low complexity with minimal soft detection bits.

Abstract

Modern applications are driving demand for ultra-reliable low-latency communications, rekindling interest in the performance of short, high-rate error correcting codes. To that end, here we introduce a soft-detection variant of Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) called Ordered Reliability Bits GRAND that can decode any short, high-rate block-code. For a code of $n$ bits, it avails of no more than $\lceil\log_2(n)\rceil$ bits of code-book-independent quantized soft detection information per received bit to determine an accurate decoding while retaining the original algorithm's suitability for a highly parallelized implementation in hardware. ORBGRAND is shown to provide similar block error performance for codes of distinct classes (BCH, CA-Polar and RLC) with low complexity, while providing better block error rate performance than CA-SCL, a state of the art soft detection CA-Polar decoder.