A Reconfigurable Decoder for Standard-Compatible LDPC Codes and Polar Codes

With the raised requirements by 5G wireless communications, a reconfigurable decoder supporting both LDPC codes (for data plane) and polar codes (for control plane) is required. Due to the inherent structure differences between LDPC codes and polar codes, an straightforward combination of existing decoders is generally difficult. In this paper, we propose a joint decoding algorithm by analyzing the standard-compatible coding structure and re-investigating the merged BP algorithm. Based on that, we implement the joint decoding scheme using a pipelined hardware architecture and show that the proposed approach achieves higher hardware efficiency than traditional schemes. Decoding performance loss is negligible if compared with existing stand-alone LDPC or polar decoder.