Belief Propagation(BP) decoders of Polar Codes can run in parallel and have a remarkable throughput achievement at a cost of performance degradation, when compared with other decoding algorithms of polar codes. The existing improved algorithms still have a gap to be optimized in performance, complexity or latency. This paper proposes a modified BP flipping algorithm by introducing random penalty items into the reliability metrics of bits to correct un-converged errors under the type of noise with Gaussian distributions considered. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed penalizing method can exhibit significant performance gains over the original BP and other three existing BP flipping decoding algorithms with different blocks in the additive white Gaussian noise channel(AWGN) under a lower decoding latency. This shows the proposed scheme identifies the error-prone bits more efficiently.
Belief Propagation(BP) decoders of Polar Codes can run in parallel and have a remarkable throughput achievement at a cost of performance degradation, when compared with other decoding algorithms of polar codes. The existing improved algorithms still have a gap to be optimized in performance, complexity or latency. This paper proposes a modified BP flipping algorithm by introducing random penalty items into the reliability metrics of bits to correct un-converged errors under the type of noise with Gaussian distributions considered. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed penalizing method can exhibit significant performance gains over the original BP and other three existing BP flipping decoding algorithms with different blocks in the additive white Gaussian noise channel(AWGN) under a lower decoding latency. This shows the proposed scheme identifies the error-prone bits more efficiently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recently, belief propagation list (BPL) decoding has been proposed to achieve the excellent parallel decoding performance of polar codes with high throughput and low latency. However, the performance gap between BPL decoding and state-of-the-art successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding is still significant at practical SNRs. In this letter, we propose an efficient BPL flip (EBPLF) decoding algorithm for filling this gap. Firstly, an efficient bit-flipping strategy under BPL decoding is proposed to allow multiple bits being flipped more efficiently than the existing bit-flipping strategy. Then, by exploiting the decoding diversity and reliability of each bit over the multiple factor graphs within BPL decoding, an enhanced flip set is constructed to identify the error-prone patterns in an efficient way. Extensive simulation results show that EBPLF decoding outperforms the existing BPLF scheme and approaches the performance of adaptive SCL decoding at practical SNRs with much lower average latency.
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.