An Optimized Successive Cancellation List Decoder for Polar Codes Combined with Critical Set

Abstract

Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder has high decoding performance but also require great resource consumption. In this paper, we combine the SCL decoder and the critical set to form a new decoder, which can stably reduce the number of operations by 65% <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sim$</tex> 70% and maintain similar decoding performance to SCL decoder. The reduction in resource consumption depends only on the arrangement of unfrozen bit sequences, not on the quality of the channel. We also propose to combine this new decoder with adaptive algorithms. In this way, the decoding performance of the decoder can be improved beyond SCL decoders without increasing resource consumption.