Reduced-Complexity Belief Propagation Decoding for Polar Codes

We propose three effective approximate belief propagation decoders for polar codes using Maclaurin's series, piecewise linear function, and stepwise linear function. The proposed decoders have the better performance than that of existing approximate belief propagation polar decoders, min-sum decoder and normalized min-sum decoder, and almost the same performance with that of original belief propagation decoder. Moreover, the proposed decoders achieve such performance without any optimization process according to the code parameters and channel condition unlike normalized min-sum decoder, offset min-sum decoder, and their variants.