Mutual-Information-Based Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

摘要

We present a novel successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding method for the polar codes based on the mutualinformation values of the bit-channels. At short-to-medium blocklengths, only a certain fraction of the bit-channels get polarized. Usually the mutual-information values for the bit- channels are computed for the construction of the code. Using these available mutual-information values, we identify the information bits exhibiting full polarization and having high channel reliability. In the proposed mutual- information-based SCL (MI-SCL) decoder, only one emanating path is considered for such bits. This results in the reduction of the width of the decoding tree. Simulation results confirm the impressive performance of the MI-SCL decoder specially with concatenated cyclic redundancy check codes.