Mathematics
An Error Segment Bit-Flip Algorithm for Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes
Jing Zhang, Hongbing Qiu, Ling Zhan, Lili Chen
Abstract
Polar codes have garnered significant attention since they were proposed due to their capacity-achieving properties and their low-complexity decoding process, and they were selected as the coding scheme for the control channel in 5G mobile communication technology. A successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder, aided by a cyclic redundancy check (CRC), performs the competitive error correcting performance for polar codes compared to other sophisticated codes. The SCL-Flip decoding algorithm is proposed to enhance the error correction performance of the SCL. However, the SCL-Flip is hampered by a high decoding complexity due to the necessary selection and sorting process of path metrics (PMs). Additionally, it requires a large number of iterations to achieve a good error correction performance. In this paper, we propose the error segment bit-flip (ES-SCL-Flip) decoding algorithm, a simplified bit-flip approach for the SCL decoder based on analyzing the distributions of the first error bit. Firstly, we construct an index set with a high probability of the first erroneous bit. Second, a bit-flip criterion is introduced to prevent the costly operation of the PM selection and sorting without compromising the error correction performance. Finally, a search strategy is employed that utilizes segmented error indication to target and rectify the initial error segment sequentially. The simulation results demonstrate that the ES-SCL-Flip decoder provides an improved error correction performance with only a minimal increase in decoding complexity compared to the conventional CRC-aided SCL decoder. This algorithm attains a commendable equilibrium between the error correction performance and decoding complexity.