An Improved Path Splitting Decision-Aided SCL Decoding Algorithm for Polar Codes

Abstract

Although the traditional successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithm can greatly improve the performance of successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm, multiple path splitting and sorting operations increase the complexity. In order to reduce the complexity of the SCL algorithm, a new path splitting decision strategy is proposed to reduce the number of path splitting (PSN). This strategy is based on a new auxiliary path metric (APM) proposed in this letter, which is used to identify whether the decoding path is wrong. Wrong paths can be avoided by comparing the predicted APM with the threshold. The simulation results show that the proposed path splitting decision-aided SCL (PSD-SCL) algorithm reduces the complexity compared with other list decoding algorithms with small performance loss at high signal-noise ratio (SNR).