Adjustable Soft List Decoding for Polar Codes

Abstract

The soft-decision decoding of polar codes is a trend that will be extensively applied in modern complex communication systems. However, the existing soft-decision decoding of polar codes is not satisfied due to the poor performance and high complexity. In this paper, a novel adjustable list decoding and its soft-decision type are proposed. Some bounds are given to depict the features of the decoding list with a correct path, which provides a guide to adjust the decoding list. The proposed adjustable list decoding scheme can achieve an equivalent performance to conventional SCL with significant lower complexity. Moreover, the soft adjustable list decoding can also outperform than the conventional soft-decision decoding schemes in concatenated structures.