Improved successive cancellation flip decoding of polar codes based on error distribution

Polar codes are a class of linear block codes that provably achieves channel capacity, and have been selected as a coding scheme for 5th generation wireless communication standards. Successive-cancellation (SC) decoding of polar codes has mediocre error-correction performance on short to moderate codeword lengths: the SC-Flip decoding algorithm is one of the solutions that have been proposed to overcome this issue. On the other hand, SC-Flip has a higher implementation complexity compared to SC due to the required log-likelihood ratio (LLR) selection and sorting process. Moreover, it requires a high number of iterations to reach good error-correction performance. In this work, we propose two techniques to improve the SC-Flip decoding algorithm for low-rate codes, based on the observation of channel-induced error distributions. The first one is a fixed index selection (FIS) scheme to avoid the substantial implementation cost of LLR selection and sorting with no cost on error-correction performance. The second is an enhanced index selection (EIS) criterion to improve the error-correction performance of SC-Flip decoding. A reduction of 24.6% in the implementation cost of logic elements is estimated with the FIS approach, while simulation results show that EIS leads to an improvement on error-correction performance improvement up to 0.34 dB at a target FER of 10−4.