Soft-Output Fast Successive-Cancellation List Decoder for Polar Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast soft-output successive cancellation list decoder for polar codes that reduces decoding latency by integrating node-based fast decoding, maintaining performance while improving speed.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel SO-FSCL decoder that combines fast decoding techniques with soft-output SCL decoding to significantly lower latency.

Findings

Latency is significantly reduced

Performance is maintained compared to SO-SCL

Effective integration of fast decoding techniques

Abstract

The soft-output successive cancellation list (SOSCL) decoder provides a methodology for estimating the a-posteriori probability log-likelihood ratios by only leveraging the conventional SCL decoder for polar codes. However, the sequential nature of SCL decoding leads to a high decoding latency for the SO-SCL decoder. In this paper, we propose a soft-output fast SCL (SO-FSCL) decoder by incorporating node-based fast decoding into the SO-SCL framework. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SO-FSCL decoder significantly reduces the decoding latency without loss of performance compared with the SO-SCL decoder.