Abstract-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 patterns (rate one and single parity check codes), while keeping the error-correction performance unaltered. In this paper, we improve SSCL and SSCL-SPC by proving that the list size imposes a specific number of path splitting required to decode rate one and single parity check codes. Thus, the number of splitting can be limited while guaranteeing exactly the same error-correction performance as if the paths were forked at each bit estimation. We call the new decoding algorithms Fast-SSCL and Fast-SSCL-SPC. Moreover, we show that the number of path forks in a practical application can be tuned to achieve desirable speed, while keeping the error-correction performance almost unchanged. Hardware architectures implementing both algorithms are then described and implemented: it is shown that our design can achieve 1.86 Gb/s throughput, higher than the best state-of-the-art decoders.

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Polar codes are a channel coding scheme for the next generation of wireless communications standard (5G). The belief propagation (BP) decoder allows for parallel decoding of polar codes, making it suitable for high throughput applications. However, the error-correction performance of polar codes under BP decoding is far from the requirements of 5G. It has been shown that the error-correction performance of BP can be improved if the decoding is performed on multiple permuted factor graphs of polar codes. However, a different BP decoding scheduling is required for each factor graph permutation which results in the design of a different decoder for each permutation. Moreover, the selection of the different factor graph permutations is at random, which prevents the decoder to achieve a desirable errorcorrection performance with a small number of permutations. In this paper, we first show that the permutations on the factor graph can be mapped into suitable permutations on the codeword positions. As a result, we can make use of a single decoder for all the permutations. In addition, we introduce a method to construct a set of predetermined permutations which can provide the correct codeword if the decoding fails on the original permutation. We show that for the 5G polar code of length 1024, the error-correction performance of the proposed decoder is more than 0.25 dB better than that of the BP decoder with the same number of random permutations at the frame error rate of 10 −4 .

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Reed-Muller (RM) and polar codes are a class of capacity-achieving channel coding schemes with the same factor graph representation. Low-complexity decoding algorithms fall short in providing a good error-correction performance for RM and polar codes. Using the symmetric group of RM and polar codes, the specific decoding algorithm can be carried out on multiple permutations of the factor graph to boost the errorcorrection performance. However, this approach results in high decoding complexity. In this paper, we first derive the total number of factor graph permutations on which the decoding can be performed. We further propose a successive permutation (SP) scheme which finds the permutations on the fly, thus the decoding always progresses on a single factor graph permutation. We show that SP can be used to improve the error-correction performance of RM and polar codes under successive-cancellation (SC) and SC list (SCL) decoding, while keeping the memory requirements of the decoders unaltered. Our results for RM and polar codes of length 128 and rate 0.5 show that when SP is used and at a target frame error rate of 10 −4 , up to 0.5 dB and 0.1 dB improvement can be achieved for RM and polar codes respectively.