Polar codes provide a promising new direction in channel coding that is expected to play a vital role in 5G wireless cellular communication systems. Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding, as a widely adopted decoding scheme for polar codes, sacrifices decoding complexity and latency to improve error performance. To address the shortcomings of SCL, a decoding complexity and latency reduction technique, denoted bit skipping and verified to be applicable for most list decoders, is proposed in this thesis. By bypassing unnecessary sorting operations, bit skipping reduced the decoding complexity, for a half rate code, by 27.2% while increasing throughput by 19.1%. A hybrid decoder for decoding complexity reduction was also proposed and was shown to reduce the decoding complexity by up to 97.8% under favorable channel conditions.
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