A Fast Polar Code List Decoder Architecture Based on Sphere Decoding

作者：Hashemi Seyyed Ali^*; Condo Carlo; Gross Warren J

来源：IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I-REGULAR PAPERS, 2016, 63(12): 2368-2380.

DOI：10.1109/TCSI.2016.2619324

• Hardware implementation
• list decoding
• polar codes
• sphere decoding
• successive-cancellation decoding

Polar codes are a recently discovered family of capacity-achieving error-correcting codes. Among the proposed decoding algorithms, successive-cancellation list decoding guarantees the best error-correction performance with codes of moderate lengths, but it yields low throughput. Speed-up techniques have been proposed in the past: most of them rely on approximations that degrade the error-correction capability of the algorithm. We propose a speed-up technique for successive-cancellation list decoding of polar codes that is exact for list size of 2, while its approximations bring negligible error-correction performance degradation (<0.05 dB) for other list sizes. A decoder architecture is designed: the proposed technique increases the throughput of a factor of 3.16x, at the cost of 14.2% in area occupation.

• 出版日期2016-12