Fast List Decoders for Polar Codes

Abstract: Polar codes asymptotically achieve the symmetric capacity of memoryless channels, yet their error-correcting performance under successive-cancellation (SC) decoding for short and moderate length codes is worse than that of other modern codes such as low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Of the many methods to improve the error-correction performance of polar codes, list decoding yields the best results, especially when the polar code is concatenated with a cyclic redundancy check (CRC). List decoding involves exploring several decoding paths with SC decoding, and therefore tends to be slower than SC decoding itself, by an order of magnitude in practical implementations. In this paper, we present a new algorithm based on unrolling the decoding tree of the code that improves the speed of list decoding by an order of magnitude when implemented in software. Furthermore, we show that for software-defined radio applications, our proposed algorithm is faster than the fastest software implementations of LDPC decoders in the literature while offering comparable error-correction performance at similar or shorter code lengths.