An Adaptive Successive Cancellation List Decoder for Polar Codes with Cyclic Redundancy Check

Abstract

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 at least one survival path 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 maximum list size can achieve a frame error rate FER ≤ 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-3</sup> {-3} at E <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">b</sub> /N <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">o</sub> = 1.1dB, which is about 0.25dB from the information theoretic limit at this block length.