Hardware architectures for successive cancellation decoding of polar codes

Abstract

The recently-discovered polar codes are widely seen as a major breakthrough in coding theory. These codes achieve the capacity of many important channels under successive cancellation decoding. Motivated by the rapid progress in the theory of polar codes, we propose a family of architectures for efficient hardware implementation of successive cancellation decoders. We show that such decoders can be implemented with O(n) processing elements and O(n) memory elements, while providing constant throughput. We also propose a technique for overlapping the decoding of several consecutive codewords, thereby achieving a significant speed-up factor. We furthermore show that successive cancellation decoding can be implemented in the logarithmic domain, thereby eliminating the multiplication and division operations and greatly reducing the complexity of each processing element.