Compared with successive cancellation list (SCL) decoders, belief propagation (BP)-based decoders suffer performance loss in middle-and high-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. By analyzing the behavior of the incorrect decoding results of the bit-flipping BP decoder with a critical set of order ω (BFBP-CSω), we found that undetected errors mainly contribute to the error floor. Based on this observation, we proposed a belief propagation decoder with multiple bit-flipping sets (BFSs) and stopping criteria (BP-MF-MC) in this work. We use multiple stopping criteria to identify undetected errors and a small BFS to find an additional estimated codeword given by the bit-flipping BP (BFBP) function. For uncorrected errors, we use multiple BFSs to find estimated codewords with the BFBP function. Furthermore, we propose a method to dynamically generate a BFS based on the submatrix check. This method can remove unnecessary bit-flipping positions and increase the order of the critical set. Then, the best codeword is selected from all estimated codewords according to the maximum likelihood principle. Numerical results show that BP-MF-MC performs similarly to the cyclic redundancy check-aided SCL (CA-SCL) decoder with list size 16 and is slightly worse than CA-SCL with list size 32.
Compared with successive cancellation list (SCL) decoders, belief propagation (BP)-based decoders suffer performance loss in middle-and high-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. By analyzing the behavior of the incorrect decoding results of the bit-flipping BP decoder with a critical set of order ω (BFBP-CSω), we found that undetected errors mainly contribute to the error floor. Based on this observation, we proposed a belief propagation decoder with multiple bit-flipping sets (BFSs) and stopping criteria (BP-MF-MC) in this work. We use multiple stopping criteria to identify undetected errors and a small BFS to find an additional estimated codeword given by the bit-flipping BP (BFBP) function. For uncorrected errors, we use multiple BFSs to find estimated codewords with the BFBP function. Furthermore, we propose a method to dynamically generate a BFS based on the submatrix check. This method can remove unnecessary bit-flipping positions and increase the order of the critical set. Then, the best codeword is selected from all estimated codewords according to the maximum likelihood principle. Numerical results show that BP-MF-MC performs similarly to the cyclic redundancy check-aided SCL (CA-SCL) decoder with list size 16 and is slightly worse than CA-SCL with list size 32.
The bit-flip method has been successfully applied to the successive cancellation (SC) decoder to improve the block error rate (BLER) performance for polar codes in the finite code length region. However, due to the sequential decoding, the SC decoder inherently suffers from longer decoding latency than that of the belief propagation (BP) decoder with efficient early stopping criterion. It is natural to ask how to perform bit-flip in a polar BP decoder. In this paper, bit-flip is introduced into the BP decoder for polar codes. The idea of critical set (CS), that is, originally proposed by Zhang et al. for identifying unreliable bits in a SC bit-flip decoder, is extended to the BP decoder here. After revealing the relationship between CS and the incorrect BP decoding results, critical set with order ω (CS-ω) is constructed to identify unreliable bit decisions in polar BP decoding. The simulation results demonstrate that compared with the conventional BP decoder, the BLER of the proposed bit-flip decoder can achieve significant signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain which is comparable to that of a cyclic redundancy check-aided SC list decoder with a moderate list size. In addition, the decoding latency of the proposed BP bit-flip decoder is only slightly higher than that of the conventional BP decoder in the medium and high SNR regions.
Since the inherent serial nature of successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding results in a long latency, belief propagation (BP) decoding for polar codes has drawn attention for high-throughput applications. However, its error correction performance is inferior to that of SCL decoding. Therefore, the bit-flipping strategy has been recently applied to BP decoding, which can approach the SCL decoding performance through multiple additional decoding attempts. The original BP flip (BPF) decoding suffers from an inaccurate identification of erroneous bits by a fixed flip set (FS), which has been improved by the generalized BPF (GBPF) decoding. In this article, the GBPF decoding is extended to support multiple bits being flipped in one decoding attempt. In addition, for two types of decoding errors: detected errors and undetected errors, we propose two novel methods to more effectively identify erroneous bits. For detected errors, the concept of loop sets is defined and a loopbased identification method is introduced based on the study of error patterns of BP decoding. On the other hand, a method to generate a more accurate fixed FS is proposed for undetected errors, which considers the bit error distribution under BP decoding. Combining the two methods, the GBPF with merged sets (GBPF-MS) decoding can achieve the SCL-8 performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art BPF, BP list, and SC flip (SCF) decoding, for polar codes with length 1024 and information rate 1/2. Implemented by 40nm CMOS technology, the proposed GBPF-MS decoder with ten flips exhibits an average throughput of 4.19 Gbps at 2.5 dB, which is 1.6× and 1.72× faster than the state-of-the-art SCL-4 and SCF decoders, respectively.
Belief propagation (BP) decoding for polar codes has been extensively studied because of its inherent parallelism. However, its performance remains inferior to that of successive cancellation list decoding (SCL) due to the structure of the decoding graph. To improve the block error rate (BLER) performance, the BP correction (BPC) decoding, a post-processing scheme that corrects prior knowledge of the identified code bit, improves convergence by executing additional iterations on the failed BP decoder. Moreover, the BPC decoder demonstrates a better decoding performance than the BP-based bit-flipping decoder. Nevertheless, the additional decoding attempts lead to increased latency. In this article, a modified BPC decoder is proposed to reduce the number of decoding attempts by redefining the correction rules. A new metric is designed to effectively identify the corrected location. Numerical results show that the proposed modified BPC decoder achieves a slight improvement in BLER compared with the original BPC, with a dramatic reduction in average complexity. Furthermore, a higher-order version, named MBPC-Ω, is extended to further improve the performance, where the Ω is the maximum correction order. Numerical results show that the higher-order modified BPC achieves a similar BLER performance to existing multiple bit-flipping BP decoders but has around half the latency overhead. In addition, the proposed MBPC-2 decoder performs better than the cyclic redundancy check-aided SCL (CA-SCL) decoder with list size 4 and is slightly worse than the CA-SCL with list size 8 in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions but with significant decoding latency reduction.
Due to the design principle of parallel processing, belief propagation (BP) decoding is attractive, and it provides good error-correction performance compared with successive cancellation (SC) decoding. However, its error-correction performance is still inferior to that of successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding. Consequently, this paper proposes a novel flip-list- (FL)-enabled belief propagation (BP) method to improve the error-correction performance of BP decoding for polar codes with low computational complexity. The proposed technique identifies the vulnerable channel log-likelihood ratio (LLR) that deteriorates the BP decoding result. The FL is utilized to efficiently identify the erroneous channel LLRs and correct them for the next BP decoding attempt. The preprocessed channel LLR through FL improves the error-correction performance with minimal flipping attempts and reduces the computational complexity. The proposed technique was compared with the state-of-the-art BP, i.e., BP bit-flip (BP-BF), generalized BP-flip (GBPF), cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-aided (CA-SCL) decoding, and ordered statistic decoding (OSD), algorithms. Simulation results showed that the FL-BP had an excellent block error rate (BLER) performance gain up to 0.7 dB compared with BP, BP-BF, and GBPF decoder. Besides, the computational complexity was reduced considerably in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime compared with the BP-BF and GBPF decoding methods.
Belief propagation (BP) has attracted increasing attention due to its high parallelism. In this letter, a correction method is proposed to improve the block error rate (BLER) performance of the BP decoder for polar codes so that it is comparable to that of the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder. Compared with BP flipping (BPF) decoding, the proposed decoder focuses on prior knowledge of the code bits in the factor graph. Two strategies have been proposed to construct the correction set. The simulation results show that the BPC decoder exhibits a BLER similar to that of BPF decoder while reducing the average latency and complexity by half. In addition, the BLER of the BPC decoder can approach that of the cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-aided SCL (CA-SCL) decoder in regions with low and medium signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs).
Belief propagation list (BPL) decoding for polar codes has attracted more attention due to its inherent parallel nature. However, a large gap still exists with CRC-aided SCL (CA-SCL) decoding. In this work, an improved segmented belief propagation list decoding based on bit flipping (SBPL-BF) is proposed. On the one hand, the proposed algorithm makes use of the cooperative characteristic in BPL decoding such that the codeword is decoded in different BP decoders. Based on this characteristic, the unreliable bits for flipping could be split into multiple subblocks and could be flipped in different decoders simultaneously. On the other hand, a more flexible and effective processing strategy for the priori information of the unfrozen bits that do not need to be flipped is designed to improve the decoding convergence. In addition, this is the first proposal in BPL decoding which jointly optimizes the bit flipping of the information bits and the code bits. In particular, for bit flipping of the code bits, a H-matrix aided bit-flipping algorithm is designed to enhance the accuracy in identifying erroneous code bits. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the error-correction performance of BPL decoding for medium and long codes. It is more than 0.25 dB better than the state-of-the-art BPL decoding at a block error rate (BLER) of 10−5, and outperforms CA-SCL decoding in the low signal-to-noise (SNR) region for (1024,0.5) polar codes.