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 that 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 with 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…

• SN
  Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung

  Awards: 200021_149447, 200020_146832