A Hybrid OSD-SC Decoding Algorithm for Polar Codes

In this paper, we propose a low complexity hybrid ordered statistics decoding (OSD) successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm for the polar codes. By replacing smaller size SC decoder with OSD decoder, we can improve the error correcting performance of the SC algorithm. The size of the OSD decoder can be changed to control the trade-off between the decoding complexity and the error correcting performance of the proposed algorithm. We also provide a method to further simplify the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm offers about 0.3 dB gain comparing to the SC at target bit error rate (BER) 10$^{-5}$ with code length N = 1024, 512,256 and code rate R = 1 /3. The impact of the OSD size is also simulated and analyzed.