Improved NSC decoding algorithm for polar codes based on multi-in-one neural network

Abstract

Neural network-based decoding algorithms have potential value to be researched in the field of polar codes due to their low decoding latency. The neural successive cancellation (NSC) algorithm, combining deep learning and successive cancellation (SC) algorithm of polar codes, was proposed to reduce the latency of decoding. In terms of overall latency, the NSC algorithm does not fully consider the parallel decoding of special nodes in SC decoding tree, which limits the reduction of system delay to a certain extent. In this paper, we propose a multi-in-one neural simplified successive cancellation (MIO-NSSC) decoding algorithm for polar codes based on deep learning. The proposed MIO-NSSC algorithm, which is suitable for general nodes, mainly improves the existing fast simplified successive cancellation (FSSC) and the NSC algorithms to obtain a multi-in-one neural network instead of multiple neural networks in the NSC algorithm by using a new training strategy. Through applying the FSSC algorithm to a special node, the decoding delay of the proposed algorithm is further reduced. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MIO-NSSC algorithm can achieve significant latency reduction and resource consumption efficiency improvement compared with the NSC algorithm. The latency of the proposed MIO-NSSC decoding algorithm is about 21% lower than that of the NSC algorithm, and approximately seven neural networks are saved compared with the NSC algorithm. Furthermore, the MIO-NSSC algorithm can reduce the computational complexity without loss of performance.