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IEEE Communications Letters

Improved Automorphism Ensemble Decoder for Polar Codes

Seokju Han, Bonghoe Kim, Jaehoon Chung, Jeongseok Ha

Published May 30, 2024• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In this work, we propose an improved automorphism ensemble (AE) decoder for polar codes. With successive cancellation (SC) variant automorphisms, multiple decoding paths in the AE decoder produce their estimates of the transmitted codeword. In the proposed scheme, the decoding results from the multiple paths are cleverly utilized to generate a new channel output with which an additional decoding path is established. Performance evaluations clearly demonstrate that the proposed decoder achieves significantly improved error-rate performance as compared to the existing AE decoder for polar codes.

DOI
10.1109/lcomm.2024.3407143

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In this work, we propose an improved automorphism ensemble (AE) decoder for polar codes. With successive cancellation (SC) variant automorphisms, multiple decoding paths in the AE decoder produce their estimates of the transmitted codeword. In the proposed scheme, the decoding results from the multiple paths are cleverly utilized to generate a new channel output with which an additional decoding path is established. Performance evaluations clearly demonstrate that the proposed decoder achieves significantly improved error-rate performance as compared to the existing AE decoder for polar codes.
In this paper we deal with polar code automorphisms that are beneficial under low-latency automorphism ensemble (AE) decoding, and we propose polar code designs that have such automorphisms. Successive-cancellation (SC) decoding and thus SC-based AE decoding are invariant with respect to the only known polar code automorphisms, namely those of the lower-triangular affine (LTA) group. To overcome this problem, we provide methods to determine whether a given polar code has non-LTA automorphisms and to identify such automorphisms. Building on this, we design specific polar codes that admit automorphisms in the upper-diagonal linear (UTL) group, and thus render SC-based AE decoding effective. Demonstrated by examples, these new polar codes under AE decoding outperform conventional polar codes under SC list decoding in terms of error rate, while keeping the latency comparable to SC decoding. Moreover, state-of-the-art BP-based permutation decoding for polar codes is beaten by BP-based AE thanks to this design.
Automorphism ensemble decoding with the successive cancellation constituent decoder (AED-SC) can improve the decoding performance of the successive cancellation decoder when decoding polar codes with short-to-medium code lengths. To reduce the number of automorphisms used by the AEDSC, simplified repetition handling early-stopping is proposed in this work. Compared to the original repetition handling earlystopping, our simplified version compares the path metric instead of the codeword. Up to a 2×2 \times2× reduction in the number of automorphisms used is observed when decoding polar codes with different code lengths and dimensions while having little degraded decoding performance. Also, the proposed simplification reduces the number of bit comparisons from a number equal to the code length to the number of bits required to represent the path metric.
Automorphism ensemble (AE) decoding for polar codes was proposed by decoding permuted codewords with successive cancellation (SC) decoders in parallel and hence has lower latency compared to that of successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding. However, some automorphisms are SC-invariant, thus are redundant in AE decoding. In this paper, we find a necessary and sufficient condition related to the block lower-triangular structure of transformation matrices to identify SC-invariant automorphisms. Furthermore, we provide an algorithm to determine the complete SC-invariant affine automorphisms under a specific polar code construction.
Automorphism ensemble decoding (AED) with the successive cancellation (SC) constituent decoder (AED-SC) can achieve similar decoding performance to the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder when decoding short-to-medium-length polar codes. However, implementing automorphisms requires additional hardware for routing, leading to significant area overhead, especially with a large number of automorphisms. We propose methods for selecting automorphisms in SC decoders to reduce routing overhead. We establish the equivalence between automorphism selection and the NP-hard minimum K-union (MKU) problem. To maintain decoding performance under the selected automorphisms, we formulate the equivalence class property of AED-SC as a quadratic constraint. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our method achieves up to a 2.9× reduction in the number of routes needed to implement all automorphisms.
The discovery of suitable automorphisms of polar codes gained a lot of attention by applying them in Automorphism Ensemble Decoding (AED) to improve the error-correction performance, especially for short block lengths. This paper introduces Successive Cancellation Automorphism List (SCAL) decoding of polar codes as a novel application of automorphisms in advanced Successive Cancellation List (SCL) decoding. Initialized with L permutations selected from the automorphism group, a superposition of different noise realizations and path splitting takes place inside the decoder. In this way, the SCAL decoder automatically adapts to the channel conditions and outperforms the error-correction performance of conventional SCL decoding and AED. For a polar code of length 128, SCAL performs near Maximum Likelihood (ML) decoding with L=8, in contrast to M=16 needed decoder cores in AED. Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementations in a 12nm technology show that high-throughput, pipelined SCAL decoders outperform AED in terms of energy efficiency and power density, and SCL decoders additionally in area efficiency.
Polar codes have been recently shown to have an automorphism group larger than the lower-triangular affine group. Permutations from this group can be used in an automorphism successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm providing a lower latency compared to that of successive cancellation list decoding. In this paper, we demonstrate that any permutation from the automorphism group of Reed-Muller codes is suitable for permutation-based SC decoding of polar codes. Specifically, a code obtained by a permutation that is not in the automorphism group of the code, but is in the automorphism group of Reed-Muller codes, is shown to be a polar subcode. Simulations results show that these additional permutations allow improving performance of the automorphism SC decoding algorithm limited to the permutations from the automorphism group of the code.