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arXiv:1806.11195 · Globecom

On the Decoding of Polar Codes on Permuted Factor Graphs

Nghia Doan, Seyyed Ali Hashemi, Marco Mondelli, Warren J. Gross

Published Dec 1, 2018• 87 citations
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Abstract

Polar codes are a channel coding scheme for the next generation of wireless communications standard (5G). The belief propagation (BP) decoder allows for parallel decoding of polar codes, making it suitable for high throughput applications. However, the error-correction performance of polar codes under BP decoding is far from the requirements of 5G. It has been shown that the error-correction performance of BP can be improved if the decoding is performed on multiple permuted factor graphs of polar codes. However, a different BP decoding scheduling is required for each factor graph permutation which results in the design of a different decoder for each permutation. Moreover, the selection of the different factor graph permutations is at random, which prevents the decoder to achieve a desirable error correction performance with a small number of permutations. In this paper, we first show that the permutations on the factor graph can be mapped into suitable permutations on the codeword positions. As a result, we can make use of a single decoder for all the permutations. In addition, we introduce a method to construct a set of predetermined permutations which can provide the correct codeword if the decoding fails on the original permutation. We show that for the 5G polar code of length 1024, the error-correction performance of the proposed decoder is more than 0.25 dB better than that of the BP decoder with the same number of random permutations at the frame error rate of 10-4.

DOI
10.1109/glocom.2018.8647308

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Polar codes are a channel coding scheme for the next generation of wireless communications standard (5G). The belief propagation (BP) decoder allows for parallel decoding of polar codes, making it suitable for high throughput applications. However, the error-correction performance of polar codes under BP decoding is far from the requirements of 5G. It has been shown that the error-correction performance of BP can be improved if the decoding is performed on multiple permuted factor graphs of polar codes. However, a different BP decoding scheduling is required for each factor graph permutation which results in the design of a different decoder for each permutation. Moreover, the selection of the different factor graph permutations is at random, which prevents the decoder to achieve a desirable error correction performance with a small number of permutations. In this paper, we first show that the permutations on the factor graph can be mapped into suitable permutations on the codeword positions. As a result, we can make use of a single decoder for all the permutations. In addition, we introduce a method to construct a set of predetermined permutations which can provide the correct codeword if the decoding fails on the original permutation. We show that for the 5G polar code of length 1024, the error-correction performance of the proposed decoder is more than 0.25 dB better than that of the BP decoder with the same number of random permutations at the frame error rate of 10-4.
In this paper we address the problem of selecting factor-graph permutations of polar codes under belief propagation (BP) decoding to significantly improve the error-correction performance of the code. In particular, we formalize the factor-graph permutation selection as the multi-armed bandit problem in reinforcement learning and propose a decoder that acts like an online-learning agent that learns to select the good factor-graph permutations during the course of decoding. We use state-of-the-art algorithms for the multi-armed bandit problem and show that for a 5G polar codes of length 128 with 64 information bits, the proposed decoder has an error-correction performance gain of around 0.125 dB at the target frame error rate of 10-4, when compared to the approach that randomly selects the factor-graph permutations.
Owing to its high parallelism, belief propagation (BP) decoding is highly amenable to high-throughput implementations and thus represents a promising solution for meeting the ultra-high peak data rate of future communication systems. However, for polar codes, the error-correcting performance of BP decoding is far inferior to that of the widely used CRC-aided successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithm. To close the performance gap to SCL, BP list (BPL) decoding expands the exploration of candidate codewords through multiple permuted factor graphs (PFGs). From an implementation perspective, designing a unified and flexible hardware architecture for BPL decoding that supports various PFGs and code configurations presents a big challenge. In this paper, we propose the first hardware implementation of a BPL decoder for polar codes and overcome the implementation challenge by applying a hardware-friendly algorithm that generates flexible permutations on-the-fly. First, we derive the graph selection gain and provide a sequential generation (SG) algorithm to obtain a near-optimal PFG set. We further prove that any permutation can be decomposed into a combination of multiple fixed routings, and we design a low-complexity permutation network to satisfy the decoding schedule. Our BPL decoder not only has a low decoding latency by executing the decoding and permutation generation in parallel, but also supports an arbitrary list size without any area overhead. Experimental results show that, for length-1024 polar codes with a code rate of one-half, our BPL decoder with 32 PFGs has a similar error-correcting performance to SCL with a list size of 4 and achieves a throughput of 25.63 Gbps and an area efficiency of 29.46 Gbps/mm2^{2}2 at SNR=4.0dB, which is 1.82×\times× and 4.33×\times× faster than the state-of-the-art BP flip and SCL decoders,~respectively
Due to its high parallelism, belief propagation (BP) decoding is amenable to high-throughput applications and thus represents a promising solution for the ultra-high peak data rate required by future communication systems. To bridge the performance gap compared to the widely used successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithm, BP list (BPL) decoding for polar codes extends candidate codeword exploration via multiple permuted factor graphs (PFGs) to improve the error-correcting performance of BP decoding. However, it is a significant challenge to design a unified and flexible BPL hardware architecture that supports various PFGs and code configurations. In this paper, we present the first VLSI implementation of a BPL decoder for polar codes that overcomes this implementation challenge with a hardware-friendly algorithm for on-the-fly flexible permutations. First, we introduce a sequential generation (SG) algorithm to obtain a near-optimal PFG set. Additionally, we demonstrate that any permutation can be decomposed into a combination of multiple fixed routings, and design a low-complexity permutation network to generate graphs in an on-the-fly fashion. Our BPL decoder has a low decoding latency by executing decoding and permutation generation in parallel and supports arbitrary list sizes without area overhead. Experimental results based on 28nm FD-SOI technology show that for length-1024 polar codes with a code rate of one-half, our BPL decoder with 32 PFGs exhibits similar error-correcting performance to SCL with a list size of 4 and achieves an average throughput of 25.63 Gbps and an area efficiency of 29.46 Gbps/mm2, which is 1.82× and 4.33× faster than the state-of-the-art BP flip and SCL decoders, respectively
The belief propagation (BP) decoding of polar codes provides better bit error rate (BER) and packet error rate (PER) performance than the successive cancelation (SC) decoding. It has been reported in the literature that the graph of BP decoding of polar codes can be permuted to provide even better decoding performance. In this paper, we theoretically prove that all permutations of the graph are equivalent in terms of the polar encoding. For BP decoding, it is shown that permutations of the layers of the graph also permute the bit channels. A principle which protects the weakest information bit channel is provided in the paper. Two parallel BP decoders, one employing the standard graph and the other selected based on the selection principle, are also proposed to work together. The simulation results show that when the total number of iterations is fixed, the proposed BP decoding can have the same performance as the existing permutation scheme while provides a higher throughput.
Polar codes have become the channel coding scheme for control channel of enhanced mobile broadband in the 5G communication systems. Belief propagation (BP) decoding of polar codes has advantages of low decoding latency and high parallelism but achieves worse bit error ratio (BER) performance compared with the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding scheme. In this paper, an improved BP list (IBPL) decoding algorithm is proposed with comparable BER performance to SCL algoritm. Firstly, the optimal permuted factor graph is analyzed for polar codes, which improves the performance of the BP decoder without path extension. Furthermore, based on the optimal graph, the bit metric and decoding path metric are proposed to extend and prune the decoding path. The proposed IBPL decoder is focused on not only the permutation of polar codes but also the reliabilities of decoded codewords during each iteration of BP decoding, which has a more accurate decoding path list. The simulation results show that the proposed IBPL decoder improves the BER performance compared with the original BP decoder significantly, and can approach the performance of the SCL decoder at low signal to noise ratio regions.
Belief propagation (BP) is an iterative decoding algorithm for polar codes which can be parallelized effectively to achieve higher throughput. However, because of the presence of error floor due to cycles and stopping sets in the factor graph, the performance of the BP decoder is far from the performance of state of the art cyclic redundancy check (CRC) aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoders. It has been shown that successive BP decoding on multiple permuted factor graphs, which is called the multi-trellis BP decoder, can improve the error performance. However, when permuting the entire factor graph, since the decoder dismisses the information from the previous permutation, the number of iterations required is significantly larger than that of the standard BP decoder. In this work, we propose a new variant of the multi-trellis BP decoder which permutes only a subgraph of the original factor graph. This enables the decoder to retain information of variable nodes in the subgraphs, which are not permuted, reducing the required number of iterations needed in-between the permutations. As a result, the proposed decoder can perform permutations more frequently, hence being more effective in mitigating the effect of cycles which cause oscillation errors. Experimental results show that for a polar code with block length 1024 and rate 0.5 the error performance gain of the proposed decoder at the frame error rate of 10−610^{-6}10−6 is 0.25 dB compared to multi-trellis decoder based on full permutations. This performance gain is achieved along with reduced latency in terms of the number of iterations.