Known for their capacity-achieving abilities, polar codes have been selected as the control channel coding scheme for 5G communications. To satisfy high throughput and low latency, belief propagation (BP) is ideal as the decoding algorithm due to its nature of parallel processing. However, the error performance of BP is in general worse than that of enhanced successive cancellation (SC). Recently, bit-flipping (BF) mechanism is applied to BP decoding to lower the error rate. However, its trial-and-error process results in longer latency. In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network-aided bit-flipping (CNN-BF) mechanism to further enhance BP decoding. With carefully designed input data and model architecture, our proposed CNN-BF can achieve better error correction capability with less flipping attempts than prior works. It also achieves a lower block error rate (BLER) than SC list (SCL).
Known for their capacity-achieving abilities, polar codes have been selected as the control channel coding scheme for 5G communications. To satisfy high throughput and low latency, belief propagation (BP) is ideal as the decoding algorithm due to its nature of parallel processing. However, the error performance of BP is in general worse than that of enhanced successive cancellation (SC). Recently, bit-flipping (BF) mechanism is applied to BP decoding to lower the error rate. However, its trial-and-error process results in longer latency. In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network-aided bit-flipping (CNN-BF) mechanism to further enhance BP decoding. With carefully designed input data and model architecture, our proposed CNN-BF can achieve better error correction capability with less flipping attempts than prior works. It also achieves a lower block error rate (BLER) than SC list (SCL).
Known for their capacity-achieving abilities, polar codes have been selected as the control channel coding scheme for 5G communications. To satisfy the needs of high throughput and low latency, belief propagation (BP) is chosen as the decoding algorithm. However, in general, the error performance of BP is worse than that of enhanced successive cancellation (SC). Recently, critical-set bit-flipping (CS-BF) is applied to BP decoding to lower the error rate. However, its trial and error process result in even longer latency. In this work, we propose a convolutional neural network-assisted bit-flipping (CNN-BF) mechanism to further enhance BP decoding of polar codes. With carefully designed input data and model architecture, our proposed CNN-BF can achieve much higher prediction accuracy and better error correction capability than CS-BF but with only half latency. It also achieves a lower block error rate (BLER) than SC list (CA-SCL).
Known for their capacity-achieving abilities and low complexity for both encoding and decoding, polar codes have been selected as the control channel coding scheme for 5G communications. To satisfy the needs of high throughput and low latency, belief propagation (BP) is chosen as the decoding algorithm. However, it suffers from worse error performance than that of cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL). Recently, convolutional neural network-aided bit-flipping (CNN-BF) is applied to BP decoding, which can accurately identify the erroneous bits to achieve a better error rate and lower decoding latency than prior critical-set bit-flipping (CS-BF) mechanism. However, successive BF, having better error correction capability, has not been explored in CNN-BF since the more complicated flipping strategy is out of the scope of supervised learning. In this work, by using imitation learning, a convolutional neural network-aided tree-based multiple-bits BF (CNN-Tree-MBF) mechanism is proposed to explore the benefits of multiple-bits BF. With the CRC information as additional input data, the proposed CNN-BF model can further reduce 5 flipping attempts. Besides, a tree-based flipping strategy is proposed to avoid useless flipping attempts caused by wrongly flipped bits. From the simulation results, our approach can outperform CS-BF and reduce flipping attempts by 89% when code length is 64, code rate is 0.5 and SNR is 1 dB. It also achieves a comparable block error rate (BLER) as CA-SCL.
Polar code has been selected as the control channel coding scheme for the 5th generation mobile communication technology (5G), and the performance of short polar codes is receiving intensive attention. However, belief propagation (BP) algorithm suffers from performance loss under short codes. In order to improve decoding performance, this paper proposes a BP flip decoding algorithm based on convolutional neural network (CNN-BP flip). Cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is used to check the results after BP decoding, and extracts the left messages in the factor graph of the last iteration that have not passed the CRC. The extracted messages are mapped into an image as the input of the convolutional neural network (CNN), the network model is adopted to classify the flipping bits. Compared with the critical set-based BP flip (CS-BP flip) algorithm, the CNN-BP flip algorithm achieves 0.23 dB gain at the number of flip attempts T1=5 and the block error rate (BLER)=10-2for polar code with N=64.
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.
Bit flipping was first used to improve the decoding performance of successive cancellation (SC) decoder. Since SC decoding process is serial, so the first bit that goes wrong in the decoding process will cause several subsequent bits to go wrong, which will suffer from higher decoding delay than belief propagation (BP) parallel decoding. In order to meet the performance of 5G low latency and high reliability, BP decoding algorithm have received a lot of attention. However, at medium and high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), BP decoding does not perform as well as the SC list (SCL) decoding algorithm. Hence, BP decoding algorithm borrows bit-flip strategies from SC bit flip (SCF) decoder to improve the performance. The performance of BP bit flip (BPF) decoding depends on whether the construction of the flip set is correct, so this letter proposes a flip set construction approach based on the standard deviation of the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) and the reliability weight of polarized channels, which is comparable to the existing BPF decoding, the improved algorithm can identify the error-prone bits more efficiently and improve the decoding performance.
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).