On the improvements of successive cancellation Creeper decoding for polar codes

Abstract

In this paper, an improvement for successive cancellation (SC) decoding is presented for polar codes. This improvement is based on applying Creeper approach that was used to decode convolutional codes. The proposed decoder combines a stack and a Fano approaches, allowing to significantly decrease complexity of Successive Cancellation Fano decoder at the cost of a slight increase in space complexity. We also show how to combine the SC-Creeper decoding with a bit-flipping approach to further improve the performance of SC-Creeper due to introducing additional decoding attempts.Simulation results show that the proposed SC-Creeper and SC-Creeper Flip decoders with carefully selected parameters have the same performance as both CRC-aided Successive Cancellation List decoder with list size 8 and Fano decoder, while having much smaller complexity.