Decoding schedule generating method for successive‐cancellation decoder of polar codes

Abstract

Successive cancellation (SC) is the first and widely known decoder of polar codes, which has received a lot of attentions. However, its decoding schedule generating methods are still primitive. Based on a newly found factor, this study proposes an online method to generate the decoding schedule of SC decoder by a non-recursive way. The decoding schedule of SC decoder includes two parts. One is to determine which of likelihood ratios (LRs) can be shared and which of LRs need to be calculated. The other is to select a calculation formula for a LR to be computed. As shown by the comparisons among the proposed method and existing methods, the proposed method solves the first part of the decoding schedule with constant critical path delay and lower space complexity, and solves the second part of the decoding schedule with less calculations. Besides, experimental results show that the proposed method does not affect the error performance of polar codes.