Efficient Successive Cancellation Stack Decoder for Polar Codes

As an improved version of successive cancellation (SC) polar decoder, an SC stack (SCS) decoder has been proposed for performance improvement. However, the existing SCS polar decoder suffers a lot from high time complexity at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region and space complexity compared with the SC decoder. To this end, two improved decoders are proposed to reduce time and space complexity in both low and high SNR regions. The first one is the segmented cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-aided SCS (SCA-SCS) decoder, which is based on segmented parity checkers. The second one is the adaptive SCS (ASCS) decoder, which has the flexibility of stack depth and searching width. Furthermore, a channel condition estimator is proposed to select appropriate decision criteria for different SNR scenarios. Results have shown that for the polar code of length 1024 and rate 1/2, two improved SCS decoders can perform better than the traditional SCS decoder. The proposed SCA-SCS decoder and the ASCS decoder can achieve 10.8% and 11.42% time complexity reduction and 31.68% and 60.85% space complexity reduction on average over binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channels (BI-AWGNCs), respectively. Efficient parallel hardware architecture of the SCS polar decoder is first proposed and implemented with 90- and 65-nm technologies. Results have verified its advantages over the state of the art (SOA).