Polar codes has been selected as the channel coding scheme for 5G new radio (NR) control channel. Specifically, a special type of parity-check polar (PC-Polar) codes was adopted in uplink control information (UCI). In this paper, we propose a parity-check soft-cancellation (PC-SCAN) algorithm and its simplified version to decode PC-Polar codes. The potential benefits are two-fold. First, PC-SCAN can provide soft output for PC-Polar codes, which is essential for advanced turbo receivers. Second, the decoding performance is better than that of successive cancellation (SC). This is due to the fact that parity-check constraints can be exploited by PC-SCAN to enhance the reliability of other information bits over the iterations. Moreover, we describe a cyclic-shift-register (CSR) based implementation "CSR-SCAN" to reduce both hardware cost and latency with minimum performance loss.
This paper presents an efficient hardware design approach for list successive cancellation (LSC) decoding of polar codes. By applying path-overlapping scheme, the l instances of (l > 1) successive cancellation (SC) decoder for LSC with list size l can be cut down to only one. This results in a dramatic reduction of the hardware complexity without any decoding performance loss. We also develop novel approaches to reduce the latencyassociated with the pipeline scheme. Simulation results show that with proposed design approach the hardware efficiency is increased significantly over the recently p…
In this letter, we propose an adaptive SC (Successive Cancellation)-List decoder for polar codes with CRC. This adaptive SC-List decoder iteratively increases the list size until the decoder outputs contain at least one survival path which can pass CRC. Simulation shows that the adaptive SC-List decoder provides significant complexity reduction. We also demonstrate that polar code (2048, 1024) with 24-bit CRC decoded by our proposed adaptive SC-List decoder with very large list size can achieve a frame error rate FER=0.001 at Eb/No=1.1dB, which is about 0.2dB from the information theoretic lim…
Under successive cancellation (SC) decoding, polar codes are inferior to other codes of similar blocklength in terms of frame error rate. While more sophisticated decoding algorithms such as list- or stack-decoding partially mitigate this performance loss, they suffer from an increase in complexity. In this paper, we describe a new flavor of the SC decoder, called the SC flip decoder. Our algorithm preserves the low memory requirements of the basic SC decoder and adjusts the required decoding effort to the signal quality. In the waterfall region, its average computational complexity is almost …
Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithm is a powerful method that can help polar codes achieve excellent error-correcting performance. However, the current SCL algorithm and decoders are based on likelihood or log-likelihood forms, which render high hardware complexity. In this paper, we propose a log-likelihood-ratio (LLR)-based SCL (LLR-SCL) decoding algorithm, which only needs half the computation and storage complexity than the conventional one. Then, based on the proposed algorithm, we develop low-complexity VLSI architectures for LLR-SCL decoders. Analysis results show that…
Polar codes, discovered by Arıkan, are the first error-correcting codes with an explicit construction to provably achieve channel capacity, asymptotically. However, their error-correction performance at finite lengths tends to be lower than existing capacity-approaching schemes. Using the successive-cancellation algorithm, polar decoders can be designed for very long codes, with low hardware complexity, leveraging the regular structure of such codes. We present an architecture and an implementation of a scalable hardware decoder based on this algorithm. This design is shown to scale to code le…
Polar codes are of great interests because they provably achieve the capacity of both discrete and continuous memoryless channels while having an explicit construction. Most existing decoding algorithms of polar codes are based on bit-wise hard or soft decisions. In this paper, we propose symbol-decision successive cancellation (SC) and successive cancellation list (SCL) decoders for polar codes, which use symbol-wise hard or soft decisions for higher throughput or better error performance. First, we propose to use a recursive channel combination to calculate symbol-wise channel transition pro…
Polar codes is promising because they can provably achieve the channel capacity while having an explicit construction method. Lots of work have been done for the bit-based decoding algorithm for polar codes. In this paper, generalized symbol-based successive cancellation (SC) and SC list decoding algorithms are discussed. A symbol-based recursive channel combination relationship is proposed to calculate the symbol-based channel transition probability. This proposed method needs less additions than the maximum-likelihood decoder used by the existing symbol-based polar decoding algorithm. In add…
Successive cancellation (SC) is the first and widely known decoder of polar codes, which has received a lot of attentions recently. However, its decoding schedule generating algorithms are still primitive, which are not only complex but also offline. This paper proposes a simple and online algorithm to generate the decoding schedule of SC decoder. Firstly, the dependencies among likelihood ratios (LR) are explored, which lead to the discovery of a sharing factor. Secondly, based on the online calculation of the sharing factor, the proposed algorithm is presented, which is neither based on the …
Arıkan's polar coding, is by now a well studied technique that allows achieving the symmetric capacity of binary input memoryless channels with low complexity encoding and decoding, provided that the polar decoding architecture is used and the decoding metric is matched to the true channel. In this paper, we analyze communication rates that are achievable when the polar coding/decoding architecture is used with the decoder using an incorrect model of the channel. We define the `polar mismatched capacity' as an analogue of the classical mismatched capacity, give an expression for it, and derive…
Multi-kernel polar codes have recently been proposed to construct polar codes of lengths different from powers of two. Decoder implementations for multi-kernel polar codes need to account for this feature, that becomes critical in memory management. We propose an efficient, generalized memory management framework for implementation of successivecancellation decoding of multi-kernel polar codes. It can be used on many types of hardware architectures and different flavors of SC decoding algorithms. We illustrate the proposed solution for small kernel sizes, and give complexity estimates for vari…
This paper presents a hardware architecture of fast simplified successive cancellation (fast-SSC) algorithm for polar codes, which significantly reduces the decoding latency and dramatically increases the throughput. Algorithmically, fast-SSC algorithm suffers from the fact that its decoder scheduling and the consequent architecture depends on the code rate; this is a challenge for rate-compatible system. However, by exploiting the homogeneousness between the decoding processes of fast constituent polar codes and regular polar codes, the presented design is compatible with any rate. The schedu…
We show that successive cancellation list decoding can be formulated exclusively using log-likelihood ratios. In addition to numerical stability, the log-likelihood ratio based formulation has useful properties which simplify the sorting step involved in successive cancellation list decoding. We propose a hardware architecture of the successive cancellation list decoder in the log-likelihood ratio domain which, compared to a log-likelihood domain implementation, requires less irregular and smaller memories. This simplification together with the gains in the metric sorter, lead to $56\%$ to $13…
Polar codes have emerged as the most favorable channel codes for their unique capacity-achieving property. To date, numerous works have been reported for efficient design of polar codes decoder. However, these prior efforts focused on design of polar decoders via deterministic computation, while the behavior of stochastic polar decoder, which can have potential advantages such as low complexity and strong error-resilience, has not been studied in existing literatures. This paper, for the first time, investigates polar decoding using stochastic logic. Specifically, the commonly-used successive …
Polar codes provably achieve the capacity of a wide array of channels under successive decoding. This assumes infinite precision arithmetic. Given the successive nature of the decoding algorithm, one might worry about the sensitivity of the performance to the precision of the computation. We show that even very coarsely quantized decoding algorithms lead to excellent performance. More concretely, we show that under successive decoding with an alphabet of cardinality only three, the decoder still has a threshold and this threshold is a sizable fraction of capacity. More generally, we show that …
Polar codes under successive cancellation decoding proposed by Arıkan provably achieve the symmetric capacity of any given binary-input discrete memoryless channel. The successive cancellation list decoder for polar codes was described by Tal and Vardy as a generalization of the successive cancellation decoder of Arıkan. The performance of the successive cancellation list decoder is encouraging in practice. In this paper, we formalize the successive cancellation list decoder in our notation and prove that polar codes under successive cancellation list decoding achieve the symmetric capacity of…
A method for efficiently successive cancellation (SC) decoding of polar codes with high-dimensional linear binary kernels (HDLBK) is presented and analyzed. We devise a $l$-expressions method which can obtain simplified recursive formulas of SC decoder in likelihood ratio form for arbitrary linear binary kernels to reduce the complexity of corresponding SC decoder. By considering the bit-channel transition probabilities $W_{G}^{(\cdot)}(\cdot|0)$ and $W_{G}^{(\cdot)}(\cdot|1)$ separately, a $W$-expressions method is proposed to further reduce the complexity of HDLBK based SC decoder. For a $m\…
A novel permuted fast successive-cancellation list decoding algorithm with fast Hadamard transform (FHT-FSCL) is presented. The proposed decoder initializes $L$ $(L\ge1)$ active decoding paths with $L$ random codeword permutations sampled from the full symmetry group of the codes. The path extension in the permutation domain is carried out until the first constituent RM code of order $1$ is visited. Conventional path extension of the successive-cancellation list decoder is then utilized in the information bit domain. The simulation results show that for a RM code of length $512$ with $46$ info…
This paper focuses on low complexity successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding of polar codes. In particular, using the fact that splitting may be unnecessary when the reliability of decoding the unfrozen bit is sufficiently high, a novel splitting rule is proposed. Based on this rule, it is conjectured that, if the correct path survives at some stage, it tends to survive till termination without splitting with high probability. On the other hand, the incorrect paths are more likely to split at the following stages. Motivated by these observations, a simple counter that counts the successive…
As a new joint source-channel coding scheme, the double polar (D-Polar) codes have been proposed recently. In this letter, a novel joint source-channel decoder, namely the joint successive cancellation list (J-SCL) decoder, is proposed to improve the decoding performance of the D-Polar codes. We merge the trellis of the source polar code and that of the channel polar code to construct a compound trellis. In this compound trellis, the joint source-channel nodes represent both of the information bits and the high-entropy bits. Based on the compound trellis, the J-SCL decoder is designed to recov…
Polar codes have attracted a lot of attention during past few years and have been adopted as a coding scheme for 5G standard. Successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoder provides high level error-correction performance for polar codes, but the implementation complexity grows rapidly with the increase of the list size. Since the computation cost of sorting, many works focus on reducing the sorting complexity for SCL decoder. In this paper, we propose a method for SCL which directly reduce the number of input elements of sorting network without performance loss. Compared with SCL decoder, the pro…
The recently-discovered polar codes are seen as a major breakthrough in coding theory; they provably achieve the theoretical capacity of discrete memoryless channels using the low complexity successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm. Motivated by recent developments in polar coding theory, we propose a family of efficient hardware implementations for SC polar decoders. We show that such decoders can be implemented with O(n) processing elements, O(n) memory elements, and can provide a constant throughput for a given target clock frequency. Furthermore, we show that SC decoding can be impl…
In this paper, faulty successive cancellation decoding of polar codes for the binary erasure channel is studied. To this end, a simple erasure-based fault model is introduced to represent errors in the decoder and it is shown that, under this model, polarization does not happen, meaning that fully reliable communication is not possible at any rate. Furthermore, a lower bound on the frame error rate of polar codes under faulty SC decoding is provided, which is then used, along with a well-known upper bound, in order to choose a blocklength that minimizes the erasure probability under faulty dec…
We consider the estimation of an integer vector $\hbx\in \mathbb{Z}^n$ from the linear observation $\y=\A\hbx+\v$, where $\A\in\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}$ is a random matrix with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) standard Gaussian $\mathcal{N}(0,1)$ entries, and $\v\in \mathbb{R}^m$ is a noise vector with i.i.d. $\mathcal{N}(0,σ^2 )$ entries with given $σ$. In digital communications, $\hbx$ is typically uniformly distributed over an $n$-dimensional box $\mathcal{B}$. For this estimation problem, successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoders are popular due to their low complex…
Polar codes are linear block codes that can achieve channel capacity at infinite code length. Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding relies on a set of parallel decoders; it yields good error-correction performance at finite code length, at the cost of increased implementation complexity and power consumption. Current efforts in literature focus on design-time decoder complexity reduction, while lacking practical run-time power reduction methods. In this work, input-distribution-aware SCL (IDA-SCL) decoding is proposed, that allows to determine the parallelism to adopt by performing simpl…
Polar codes, as the first provable capacity-achieving error-correcting codes, have received much attention in recent years. However, the decoding performance of polar codes with traditional successive-cancellation (SC) algorithm cannot match that of the low-density parity-check (LDPC) or turbo codes. Because SC list (SCL) decoding algorithm can significantly improve the error-correcting performance of polar codes, design of SCL decoders is important for polar codes to be deployed in practical applications. However, because the prior latency reduction approaches for SC decoders are not applicab…
A successive cancellation (SC) decoder with inactivations is proposed as an efficient implementation of SC list (SCL) decoding over the binary erasure channel. The proposed decoder assigns a dummy variable to an information bit whenever it is erased during SC decoding and continues with decoding. Inactivated bits are resolved using information gathered from decoding frozen bits. This decoder leverages the structure of the Hadamard matrix, but can be applied to any linear code by representing it as a polar code with dynamic frozen bits. SCL decoders are partially characterized using density evo…
The decoding performance of polar codes strongly depends on the decoding algorithm used, while also the decoder throughput and its latency mainly depend on the decoding algorithm. In this work, we implement the powerful successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder on a GPU and identify the bottlenecks of this algorithm with respect to parallel computing and its difficulties. The inherent serial decoding property of the SCL algorithm naturally limits the achievable speed-up gains on GPUs when compared to CPU implementations. In order to increase the decoding throughput, we use a hybrid decoding s…
BMERA or convolutional polar codes are an extension of polar codes with a provably better error exponent than polar codes. A successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm for BMERA codes similar to SC polar decoders is introduced. A pseudocode description of the SC decoder that can be extended to SC list (SCL) decoding is provided. Simulation results with and without outer CRC codes under SC and SCL decoding are presented for QAM modulation over the AWGN channel to compare the performance of polar and BMERA codes. BMERA codes outperform polar codes by more than 0.5 dB under SCL decoding with…
In this paper we propose an enhanced soft cancellation (SCAN) decoder for polar codes based on decoding stages permutation. The proposed soft cancellation list (SCANL) decoder runs $L$ independent SCAN decoders, each one relying on a different permuted factor graph. The estimated bits are selected among the $L$ candidates through a dedicated metric provided by the decoders. Furthermore, we introduce an early-termination scheme reducing decoding latency without affecting error correction performance. We investigate the error-correction performance of the proposed scheme under various combinatio…
Polar codes are a class of {\bf structured} channel codes proposed by Arıkan based on the principle of {\bf channel polarization}, and can {\bf achieve} the symmetric capacity of any Binary-input Discrete Memoryless Channel (B-DMC). The Soft CANcellation (SCAN) is a {\bf low-complexity} {\bf iterative} decoding algorithm of polar codes outperforming the widely-used Successive Cancellation (SC). Currently, in most cases, it is assumed that channel state is perfectly {\bf known} at the decoder and remains {\bf constant} during each codeword, which, however, is usually unrealistic. To decode pola…
Polar codes have gained significant amount of attention during the past few years and have been selected as a coding scheme for the next generation of mobile broadband standard. Among decoding schemes, successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoding provides a reasonable trade-off between the error-correction performance and hardware implementation complexity when used to decode polar codes, at the cost of limited throughput. The simplified SCL (SSCL) and its extension SSCL-SPC increase the speed of decoding by removing redundant calculations when encountering particular information and frozen bit…
Successive cancellation (SC) process is an essential component of various decoding algorithms used for polar codes and their variants. Rewinding this process seems trivial if we have access to all intermediate log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) and partial sums. However, as the block length increases, retaining all of the intermediate information becomes inefficient and impractical. Rewinding the SC process in a memory-efficient way is a problem that we address in this paper. We first explore the properties of the SC process based on the binary representation of the bit indices by introducing a new …
The extended Golay code is shown to be representable as a chained polar subcode. This enables its decoding with the successive cancellation algorithm and its stack generalization. The decoder can be further simplified by employing fast Hadamard transform. The complexity of the obtained algorithm is comparable with that of the Vardy algorithm.
Recently, Guo and Xia introduced low complexity decoders called Partial Interference Cancellation (PIC) and PIC with Successive Interference Cancellation (PIC-SIC), which include the Zero Forcing (ZF) and ZF-SIC receivers as special cases, for point-to-point MIMO channels. In this paper, we show that PIC and PIC-SIC decoders are capable of achieving the full cooperative diversity available in wireless relay networks. We give sufficient conditions for a Distributed Space-Time Block Code (DSTBC) to achieve full diversity with PIC and PIC-SIC decoders and construct a new class of DSTBCs with low …
Due to the low-latency and high-reliability requirements of 5G, low-complexity node-based successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding has received considerable attention for use in 5G communications systems. By identifying special constituent codes in the decoding tree and immediately decoding these, node-based SCL decoding provides a significant reduction in decoding latency compared to conventional SCL decoding. However, while there exists many types of nodes, the current node-based SCL decoders are limited by the lack of a more generalized node that can efficiently decode a larger number of…
The successive cancellation list decoding algorithm for polar codes yields near-optimal decoding performance at the cost of high implementation complexity. The successive cancellation stack algorithm has been shown to provide similar decoding performance at a much lower computational complexity, but software implementations report a sub-par T/P performance. In this technical report, the benefits of the fast simplified successive cancellation list decoder are extended to the stack algorithm, resulting in a throughput increase by two orders of magnitude over the traditional stack decoder.
Due to their capacity-achieving property, polar codes have become one of the most attractive channel codes. To date, the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithm is the primary approach that can guarantee outstanding error-correcting performance of polar codes. However, the hardware designs of the original SCL decoder have large silicon area and long decoding latency. Although some recent efforts can reduce either the area or latency of SCL decoders, these two metrics still cannot be optimized at the same time. This paper, for the first time, proposes a general log-likelihood-rati…
As improved versions of successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm, successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding and successive cancellation stack (SCS) decoding are used to improve the finite-length performance of polar codes. Unified descriptions of SC, SCL and SCS decoding algorithms are given as path searching procedures on the code tree of polar codes. Combining the ideas of SCL and SCS, a new decoding algorithm named successive cancellation hybrid (SCH) is proposed, which can achieve a better trade-off between computational complexity and space complexity. Further, to reduce the comp…
Polar code is a breakthrough in coding theory. Using list successive cancellation decoding with large list size L, polar codes can achieve excellent error correction performance. The L partial decoded vectors are stored in the path memory and updated according to the results of list management. In the state-of-the-art designs, the memories are implemented with registers and a large crossbar is used for copying the partial decoded vectors from one block of memory to another during the update. The architectures are quite area-costly when the code length and list size are large. To solve this pro…
This paper introduces algorithms for the successive-cancellation decoding and the successive-cancellation list decoding of binary polar source/channel codes. By using the symmetric parametrization of conditional probability, we reduce both space and time complexity compared to the original algorithm introduced by Tal and Vardy.
Recently, Guo and Xia gave sufficient conditions for an STBC to achieve full diversity when a PIC (Partial Interference Cancellation) or a PIC-SIC (PIC with Successive Interference Cancellation) decoder is used at the receiver. In this paper, we give alternative conditions for an STBC to achieve full diversity with PIC and PIC-SIC decoders, which are equivalent to Guo and Xia's conditions, but are much easier to check. Using these conditions, we construct a new class of full diversity PIC-SIC decodable codes, which contain the Toeplitz codes and a family of codes recently proposed by Zhang, Xu…
We describe a successive-cancellation \emph{list} decoder for polar codes, which is a generalization of the classic successive-cancellation decoder of Arıkan. In the proposed list decoder, up to $L$ decoding paths are considered concurrently at each decoding stage. Then, a single codeword is selected from the list as output. If the most likely codeword is selected, simulation results show that the resulting performance is very close to that of a maximum-likelihood decoder, even for moderate values of $L$. Alternatively, if a "genie" is allowed to pick the codeword from the list, the results ar…
We study faulty successive cancellation decoding of polar codes for the binary erasure channel. To this end, we introduce a simple erasure-based fault model and we show that, under this model, polarization does not happen, meaning that fully reliable communication is not possible at any rate. Moreover, we provide numerical results for the frame erasure rate and bit erasure rate and we study an unequal error protection scheme that can significantly improve the performance of the faulty successive cancellation decoder with negligible overhead.
A deep-learning-aided successive-cancellation list (DL-SCL) decoding algorithm for polar codes is introduced with deep-learning-aided successive-cancellation (DL-SC) decoding being a specific case of it. The DL-SCL decoder works by allowing additional rounds of SCL decoding when the first SCL decoding attempt fails, using a novel bit-flipping metric. The proposed bit-flipping metric exploits the inherent relations between the information bits in polar codes that are represented by a correlation matrix. The correlation matrix is then optimized using emerging deep-learning techniques. Performanc…
In this letter, we propose parallel SC (Successive Cancellation) decoder and parallel SC-List decoder for polar codes. The parallel decoder is composed of M=2^m(m>=1) component decoders working in parallel and each component decoder decodes a Polar code of a block size of 1/M of the original Polar code. Therefore the parallel decoder has M times faster decoding speed. Our simulation results show that the parallel decoder has almost the same error-rate performance as the conventional non-parallel decoder.
This work presents a fast successive-cancellation list flip (Fast-SCLF) decoding algorithm for polar codes that addresses the high latency issue associated with the successive-cancellation list flip (SCLF) decoding algorithm. We first propose a bit-flipping strategy tailored to the state-of-the-art fast successive-cancellation list (FSCL) decoding that avoids tree-traversal in the binary tree representation of SCLF, thus reducing the latency of the decoding process. We then derive a parameterized path selection error model to accurately estimate the bit index at which the correct decoding path…
The recently-discovered polar codes are widely seen as a major breakthrough in coding theory. These codes achieve the capacity of many important channels under successive cancellation decoding. Motivated by the rapid progress in the theory of polar codes, we propose a family of architectures for efficient hardware implementation of successive cancellation decoders. We show that such decoders can be implemented with O(n) processing elements and O(n) memory elements, while providing constant throughput. We also propose a technique for overlapping the decoding of several consecutive codewords, th…
A new permutation decoding approach for polar codes is presented. The complexity of the algorithm is similar to that of a successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder, while it can be implemented with the latency of a successive cancellation decoder. As opposed to the SCL algorithm, the sorting operation is not used in the proposed method. It is shown that the error correction performance of the algorithm is similar to that of the SCL decoder for polar codes. Moreover, a new construction aiming to improve the error correction performance of polar codes under the proposed algorithm is presented.
In this paper, we derive the exact weight distributions that emerge during each stage of successive cancellation decoding of polar codes. Though we do not compute the distance spectrum of polar codes, the results allow us to get an estimate of the decoding error probability and to show a link between the first nonzero components of the weight distribution and the partial order between the synthetic channels. Also, we establish the minimal distance between two cosets associated with two paths that differ in two positions. This can be regarded as a first step toward analyzing the weight distribu…
We focus on the metric sorter unit of successive cancellation list decoders for polar codes, which lies on the critical path in all current hardware implementations of the decoder. We review existing metric sorter architectures and we propose two new architectures that exploit the structure of the path metrics in a log-likelihood ratio based formulation of successive cancellation list decoding. Our synthesis results show that, for the list size of $L=32$, our first proposed sorter is $14\%$ faster and $45\%$ smaller than existing sorters, while for smaller list sizes, our second sorter has a h…
Motivated by the significant performance gains which polar codes experience under successive cancellation list decoding, their scaling exponent is studied as a function of the list size. In particular, the error probability is fixed and the trade-off between block length and back-off from capacity is analyzed. A lower bound is provided on the error probability under $\rm MAP$ decoding with list size $L$ for any binary-input memoryless output-symmetric channel and for any class of linear codes such that their minimum distance is unbounded as the block length grows large. Then, it is shown that …
