Threshold-Based Fast Successive-Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes
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This paper focuses on developing fast successive-cancellation (SC) decoding methods for polar codes. Fast SC decoding overcomes the latency caused by the serial nature of the SC decoding by identifying new nodes in the upper levels of the SC decoding tree and implementing their fast parallel decoders. Our proposed methods consist of several new techniques. First, a novel sequence repetition node corresponding to a class of bit sequences is presented. Most existing special node types are special cases of the proposed sequence repetition node. Then a fast parallel decoder is proposed for this class of node. To further speed up the decoding process of general nodes outside this class, a threshold-based hard-decision-aided scheme is introduced. The threshold value that guarantees a given error-correction performance in the proposed scheme is derived theoretically. Analyses and simulations on a polar code of length 1024 and rate 1/2 show that the fast decoding algorithm with the proposed node can provide 19% latency reduction at E_b/N_0 = 2.0 dB compared to the fastest SC decoding algorithm in literature without tangibly altering the error-correction performance of the code. In addition, with the help of the proposed threshold-based hard-decision-aided scheme, the decoding latency can be further reduced by 54% at E_b/N_0 = 5.0 dB.
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