Bidirectional stack decoding of polar codes

Abstract

Introduction/purpose: The paper introduces a reduced latency stack decoding algorithm of polar codes, inspired by the bidirectional stack decoding of convolutional codes and based on the folding technique. Methods: The stack decoding algorithm (also known as stack search) that is useful for decoding tree codes, the list decoding technique introduced by Peter Elias and the folding technique for polar codes which is used to reduce the latency of the decoding algorithm. The simulation was done using the Monte Carlo procedure. Results: A new polar code decoding algorithm, suitable for parallel implementation, is developed and the simulation results are presented. Conclusions: Polar codes are a class of capacity achieving codes that have been adopted as the main coding scheme for control channels in 5G New Radio. The main decoding algorithm for polar codes is the successive cancellation decoder. This algorithm performs well at large blocklengths with a low complexity, but has very low reliability at short and medium blocklengths. Several decoding algorithms have been proposed in order to improve the error correcting performance of polar codes. The successive cancellation list decoder, in conjunction with a cyclic redundancy check, provides very good error-correction performance, but at the cost of a high implementation complexity. The successive cancellation stack decoder provides similar error-correction performance at a lower complexity. Future machine-type and ultra reliable low latency communication applications require high-speed low latency decoding algorithms with good error correcting performance. In this paper, we propose a novel decoding algorithm, inspired by the bidirectional stack decoding of classical convolutional codes, with reduced latency that achieves similar performance as the classical successive cancellation list and successive cancellation stack decoding algorithms. The results are presented analytically and verified by simulation.

Keywords

• polar codes
• successive cancellation
• stack and list decoding
• folding