Low-Complexity List Successive-Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes Using List Pruning

The performance of List Successive-Cancellation Decoding (LSCD) of Polar Codes with large list size have exceeded that of Turbo codes and Low-Density Parity-Check codes. However, large list size results in huge computation complexity and this limits the applicability of LSCD in high-throughput and power- sensitive applications. In this work, a low complexity design for LSCD with large list size based on list pruning is proposed. In particular, the property of the relative path metric (RPM) of each list candidate with respect to that of the most-likely candidate is investigated. It is found that the correct candidate has a low possibility of having a large value of RPM and based on this property, a list pruning method and the corresponding low-complexity LSCDs are proposed. From the simulation results, as compared to the conventional LSCD, the proposed LSCDs have negligible performance loss while the computation complexity is reduced by more than 80%. In addition, the proposed design is hardware-friendly and easily adaptable to the existing LSCDs hardware architectures. © 2016 IEEE.