Neural decoders with permutation invariant structure

Abstract

Neural decoders were introduced as a generalization of the classic Belief Propagation (BP) decoding algorithms. In this work, we propose several neural decoders with different permutation invariant structures for BCH codes and punctured RM codes. Firstly, we propose the cyclically equivariant neural decoder which makes use of the cyclically invariant structure of these two codes. Next, we propose an affine equivariant neural decoder utilizing the affine invariant structure of those two codes. Both these two decoders outperform previous neural decoders when decoding cyclic codes. The affine decoder achieves a smaller decoding error probability than the cyclic decoder, but it usually requires a longer running time. Similar to using the property of the affine invariant property of extended BCH codes and RM codes, we propose the list decoding version of the cyclic decoder that can significantly reduce the frame error rate(FER) for these two codes. For certain high-rate codes, the gap between the list decoder and the Maximum Likelihood decoder is less than 0.1 dB when measured by FER.