A simplified belief propagation decoder for polar codes

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a simplified belief propagation(SBP) decoder for the polar codes, where the update calculation for the messages of the so-called frozen nodes is replaced by setting these nodes' messages by prior probabilities during the BP procedure. Numerical results show that the derived SBP yields almost the same performance as the BP decoders in the literature, while the computational complexity is reduced significantly, which make our SBP more suitable for practical application as compared to the existing BP decoders.