Reduced-Complexity Low-Latency Logarithmic Successive Cancellation Stack Polar Decoding for 5G New Radio and Its Software Implementation

Abstract

An efficient Fast logarithmic successive cancellation stack (Log-SCS) polar decoding algorithm is proposed along with its software implementation using single instruction multiple data (SIMD) style processing. Quantitatively, we reduce the decoding complexity by $50\%$ on average, while simultaneously attaining a decoding latency that is only $21\%$ of that of the state-of-the-art Fast successive cancellation list (SCL) polar decoder's software implementation. This is achieved without any loss of error correction performance by applying simplified path-metric (PM) computations for the rate-0, rate-1 and repetition sub-graphs of the proposed Fast Log-SCS decoder. Furthermore, a software implementation of the 32-bit fixed-point Fast Log-SCS polar decoder is conceived for x86 processors, which maintains the same block error ratio (BLER) as the floating-point Log-SCS polar decoder. Additionally, our software implementation is accelerated using SIMD instructions by relying on 512-bit Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX-512) and recursive template meta-programming for the first time, achieving a parallelism of 16, which makes it eminently suitable for the low-latency requirements of software-defined radio systems.