CRC-aided Successive Cancellation List Decoding Research Articles

On the improvements of successive cancellation Creeper decoding for polar codes

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.

Fast Frequency Sweep Analysis of Passive Miniature RF Circuits Based on Analytic Extension of Eigenvalues

The construction of polar codes with code length $n=2^m$ involves $m$ layers of polar transforms. In this paper, we observe that after each layer of polar transforms, one can swap certain pairs of adjacent bits to accelerate the polarization process. More precisely, if the previous bit is more reliable than its next bit under the successive decoder, then switching the decoding order of these two adjacent bits will make the reliable bit even more reliable and the noisy bit even noisier. Based on this observation, we propose a new family of codes called the Adjacent-Bits-Swapped (ABS) polar codes. We add a permutation layer after each polar transform layer in the construction of the ABS polar codes. In order to choose which pairs of adjacent bits to swap in the permutation layers, we rely on a new polar transform that combines two independent channels with $4$-ary inputs. This new polar transform allows us to track the evolution of every pair of adjacent bits through different layers of polar transforms, and it also plays an essential role in the Successive Cancellation List (SCL) decoder for the ABS polar codes. Extensive simulation results show that ABS polar codes consistently outperform standard polar codes by 0.15dB--0.3dB when we use CRC-aided SCL decoder with list size $32$ for both codes. The implementations of all the algorithms in this paper are available at https://github.com/PlumJelly/ABS-Polar

Post-Processing for CRC-Aided Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

In this letter, three post-processing schemes for cyclic redundancy check (CRC-)aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoding are presented for polar codes. The re-decoding based on our post-processing schemes can effectively alleviate both the channel and decision errors encountered via CA-SCL decoding. Simulation results show that our schemes perform better than conventional re-decoding schemes and can be incorporated into a polar decoder that has a small list size to achieve a performance that is expected for a large list size.

Decoder-Tailored Polar Code Design Using the Genetic Algorithm

We present a new framework for constructing polar codes (i.e., selecting the frozen bit positions) for arbitrary channels, tailored to a given decoding algorithm rather than assuming the (not necessarily optimal) successive cancellation (SC) decoding. The proposed framework is based on the genetic algorithm (GenAlg), where populations (i.e., collections) of information sets evolve via evolutionary transformations based on their individual error-rate performance. These populations converge toward an information set that fits both the decoding behavior and the defined channel. We construct polar codes, without the CRC-aid, tailored to plain successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding, achieving the same error-rate performance as the CRC-aided SCL decoding over both the AWGN channel and the Rayleigh channel, respectively. Furthermore, a proposed belief propagation (BP)-tailored construction approaches the SCL error-rate performance without any modifications in the decoding algorithm itself. The performance gains can be attributed to the significant reduction in the number of low-weight codewords. We show that, when required, the GenAlg can also be set up to find codes that reduce the decoding complexity. This way, the SCL list size or the number of BP iterations can be reduced while maintaining the same error-rate performance.

CRC-Aided Sphere Decoding for Short Polar Codes

Polar codes have recently been adopted as a coding scheme for fifth-generation wireless systems, owing to their excellent performance at short code lengths. In this letter, we propose a cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-aided sphere decoding (CA-SD) algorithm to further improve the performance of short polar codes. It provides better performance than the widely used CRC-aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoding, and it is robust to the CRC length that leads to the stable performance under a wide range of code rates. By employing the Gaussian elimination method, we transform the underlying parity check relationships in CRC as the equivalent new forms. This ensures the parity check bits can be uniquely judged by previous decoded bits rather than the redundant search during the CA-SD. By this means, the complexity of CA-SD is reduced and comparable with the CA-SCL decoding under short code lengths.

Segmented Successive Cancellation List Polar Decoding with Tailored CRC

As the first error correction codes provably achieving the symmetric capacity of binary-input discrete memory-less channels (B-DMCs), polar codes have been recently chosen by 3GPP for eMBB control channel. Among existing algorithms, CRC-aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoding is favorable due to its good performance, where CRC is placed at the end of the decoding and helps to eliminate the invalid candidates before final selection. However, the good performance is obtained with a complexity increase that is linear in list size $L$. In this paper, the tailored CRC-aided SCL (TCA-SCL) decoding is proposed to balance performance and complexity. Analysis on how to choose the proper CRC for a given segment is proposed with the help of \emph{virtual transform} and \emph{virtual length}. For further performance improvement, hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) scheme is incorporated. Numerical results have shown that, with the similar complexity as the state-of-the-art, the proposed TCA-SCL and HARQ-TCA-SCL schemes achieve $0.1$ dB and $0.25$ dB performance gain at frame error rate $\textrm{FER}=10^{-2}$, respectively. Finally, an efficient TCA-SCL decoder is implemented with FPGA demonstrating its advantages over CA-SCL decoder.

Improved reconciliation with polar codes in quantum key distribution

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is a cryptographic system that generates an information-theoretically secure key shared by two legitimate parties. QKD consists of two parts: quantum and classical. The latter is referred to as classical post-processing (CPP). Information reconciliation is a part of CPP in which parties are given correlated variables and attempt to eliminate the discrepancies between them while disclosing a minimum amount of information. The elegant reconciliation protocol known as \emph{Cascade} was developed specifically for QKD in 1992 and has become the de-facto standard for all QKD implementations. However, the protocol is highly interactive. Thus, other protocols based on linear block codes such as Hamming codes, low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, and polar codes have been researched. In particular, reconciliation using LDPC codes has been mainly studied because of its outstanding performance. Nevertheless, with small block size, the bit error rate performance of polar codes under successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoding with a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is comparable to state-of-the-art turbo and LDPC codes. In this study, we demonstrate the use of polar codes to improve the performance of information reconciliation in a QKD system with small block size. The best decoder for polar codes, a CRC-aided SCL decoder, requires CRC-precoded messages. However, messages that are sifted keys in QKD are obtained arbitrarily as a result of a characteristic of the QKD protocol and cannot be CRC-precoded. We propose a method that allows arbitrarily obtained sifted keys to be CRC precoded by introducing a virtual string. Thus the best decoder can be used for reconciliation using polar codes and improves the efficiency of the protocol.

LLR-Based Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

We show that successive cancellation list decoding can be formulated exclusively using log-likelihood ratios. In addition to numerical stability, the log-likelihood ratio based formulation has useful properties which simplify the sorting step involved in successive cancellation list decoding. We propose a hardware architecture of the successive cancellation list decoder in the log-likelihood ratio domain which, compared to a log-likelihood domain implementation, requires less irregular and smaller memories. This simplification together with the gains in the metric sorter, lead to $56\%$ to $137\%$ higher throughput per unit area than other recently proposed architectures. We then evaluate the empirical performance of the CRC-aided successive cancellation list decoder at different list sizes using different CRCs and conclude that it is important to adapt the CRC length to the list size in order to achieve the best error-rate performance of concatenated polar codes. Finally, we synthesize conventional successive cancellation decoders at large block-lengths with the same block-error probability as our proposed CRC-aided successive cancellation list decoders to demonstrate that, while our decoders have slightly lower throughput and larger area, they have a significantly smaller decoding latency.