Polar codes are capacity achieving error correcting codes that can be decoded through the successive-cancellation algorithm. To improve its error-correction performance, a list-based version called successive-cancellation list (SCL) has been proposed in the past, that however substantially increases the number of time-steps in the decoding process. The simplified SCL (SSCL) decoding algorithm exploits constituent codes within the polar code structure to greatly reduce the required number of time-steps without introducing any error-correction performance loss. In this paper, we propose a faster decoding approach to decode one of these constituent codes, the Rate-1 node. We use this Rate-1 node decoder to develop Fast-SSCL. We demonstrate that only a list-size-bound number of bits needs to be estimated in Rate-1 nodes and Fast-SSCL exactly matches the error-correction performance of SCL and SSCL. This technique can potentially greatly reduce the total number of time-steps needed for polar codes decoding: analysis on a set of case studies show that Fast-SSCL has a number of time-steps requirement that is up to 66.6% lower than SSCL and 88.1% lower than SCL.
Polar codes are capacity achieving error correcting codes that can be decoded through the successive-cancellation algorithm. To improve its error-correction performance, a list-based version called successive-cancellation list (SCL) has been proposed in the past, that however substantially increases the number of time-steps in the decoding process. The simplified SCL (SSCL) decoding algorithm exploits constituent codes within the polar code structure to greatly reduce the required number of time-steps without introducing any error-correction performance loss. In this paper, we propose a faster decoding approach to decode one of these constituent codes, the Rate-1 node. We use this Rate-1 node decoder to develop Fast-SSCL. We demonstrate that only a list-size-bound number of bits needs to be estimated in Rate-1 nodes and Fast-SSCL exactly matches the error-correction performance of SCL and SSCL. This technique can potentially greatly reduce the total number of time-steps needed for polar codes decoding: analysis on a set of case studies show that Fast-SSCL has a number of time-steps requirement that is up to 66.6% lower than SSCL and 88.1% lower than SCL.
Polar codes are capacity achieving error correcting codes that can be decoded through the successive-cancellation algorithm. To improve its error-correction performance, a list-based version called successive-cancellation list (SCL) has been proposed in the past, that however substantially increases the number of time-steps in the decoding process. The simplified SCL (SSCL) decoding algorithm exploits constituent codes within the polar code structure to greatly reduce the required number of time-steps without introducing any error-correction performance loss. In this paper, we propose a faster decoding approach to decode one of these constituent codes, the Rate-1 node. We use this Rate-1 node decoder to develop Fast-SSCL. We demonstrate that only a list-size-bound number of bits needs to be estimated in Rate-1 nodes and Fast-SSCL exactly matches the error-correction performance of SCL and SSCL. This technique can potentially greatly reduce the total number of time-steps needed for polar codes decoding: analysis on a set of case studies show that Fast-SSCL has a number of time- steps requirement that is up to 66.6% lower than SSCL and 88.1% lower than SCL.
The Successive-Cancellation List (SCL) algorithm is a popular decoding algorithm for polar codes. Although SCL algorithm overcomes the error propagation problem in polar codes decoding, the improvement of error correction performance needs to pay the price of high latency. To solve this problem, a simplified SCL (SSCL) algorithm is proposed. For some special nodes, the SSCL algorithm can calculate path metric (PM) without traversing the decoding tree to achieve direct decoding, reducing the latency and complexity of decoding. In this paper, a new special node has been discovered, it is also possible to calculate PM without traversing decoding tree. Based on this, we propose an improved SSCL algorithm. Simulation results show that improved SSCL algorithm can further reduce the decoding latency and the loss of error-correction performance is negligible.
Due to the ability to provide superior error-correction performance, the successive cancellation list (SCL) algorithm is widely regarded as one of the most promising decoding algorithms for polar codes with short-to-moderate code lengths. However, the application of SCL decoding in low-latency communication scenarios is limited due to its sequential nature. To reduce the decoding latency, developing tailored fast and efficient list decoding algorithms of specific polar constituent codes (special nodes) is a promising solution. Recently, fast list decoding algorithms are proposed by considering special nodes with low code rates. Aiming to further speedup the SCL decoding, this paper presents fast list decoding algorithms for two types of high-rate special nodes, namely single-parity-check (SPC) nodes and sequence rate one or single-parity-check (SR1/SPC) nodes. In particular, we develop two classes of fast list decoding algorithms for these nodes, where the first class uses a sequential decoding procedure to yield decoding latency that is linear with the list size, and the second further parallelizes the decoding process by pre-determining the redundant candidate paths offline. Simulation results show that the proposed list decoding algorithms are able to achieve up to 70.7% lower decoding latency than state-of-the-art fast SCL decoders, while exhibiting the same error-correction performance.
The Successive-Cancellation List (SCL) decoding algorithm is one of the most promising approaches towards practical polar code decoding. It is able to provide a good trade-off between error-correction performance and complexity, tunable through the size of the list. In this paper, we show that in the conventional formulation of SCL, there are redundant calculations which do not need to be performed in the course of the algorithm. We simplify SCL by removing these redundant calculations and prove that the proposed simplified SCL and the conventional SCL algorithms are equivalent. The simplified SCL algorithm is valid for any code and can reduce the time-complexity of SCL without affecting the space complexity.
Compared with the bit-wise successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding of polar codes, the node-based Fast SCL decoding significantly reduces the decoding latency by identifying special constituent codes and decoding these in parallel. To further reduce the latency of current Fast SCL decoders, we first propose a fast sequence repetition (SR) node-based SCL (Fast SR-SCL) decoding algorithm, which only involves one type of node in the SCL decoding tree. Furthermore, we employ the adaptive path splitting (APS) strategy to terminate the path splitting in the SR node early, without degrading the error-correcting performance. Numerical results show that for 5G uplink codes with a length of 1024 and rates of 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4, our decoder can deliver the same decoding performance while reducing the average latency by 34.5%, 38.0%, and 39.6% compared with the state-of-the-art Fast SCL decoder for a list size L = 8.
Being able to provide excellent error-correction performance for polar codes with short-to-moderate code length, successive-cancellation list (SCL) is regarded as one of the most promising decoding algorithms. However, the application of SCL decoding in low-latency communication scenarios is limited due to its sequential nature. Recently, fast list decoding algorithms are proposed by considering special nodes with low code rates. Aiming at achieving further speedup for SCL decoding, this paper presents fast list decoding algorithms for two types of high-rate special nodes, namely single-parity-check (SPC) and sequence rate-1(SRI) nodes, based on the minimum-combinations set (MCS) which is able to significantly narrow the search space of candidate paths. Typically, SPC nodes can be directly decoded within one round of path splitting procedure, whereas SR1 nodes, as a group of parallel SPC nodes, can also be decode efficiently. Simulation results show that the proposed fast SCL decoder is able to reduce the decoding latency by 68.4% as compared to the state of the art, without any error-correction performance degradation.