Simplified Successive-Cancellation List decoding of polar codes

Abstract

The Successive-Cancellation List (SCL) decoding algorithm is one of the most promising approaches towards practical polar code decoding. It is able to provide a good trade-off between error-correction performance and complexity, tunable through the size of the list. In this paper, we show that in the conventional formulation of SCL, there are redundant calculations which do not need to be performed in the course of the algorithm. We simplify SCL by removing these redundant calculations and prove that the proposed simplified SCL and the conventional SCL algorithms are equivalent. The simplified SCL algorithm is valid for any code and can reduce the time-complexity of SCL without affecting the space complexity.