An Efficient List Successive Cancellation Decoder for Polar Codes

Polar codes are one of the most favorable capacity-achieving codes due to their simple structure and low decoding complexity. However, because of the disappointing decoding performance realized using conventional successive cancellation (SC) decoders, polar codes cannot be used directly in practical applications. In contrast to conventional SC decoders, list SC (SCL) decoders with large list sizes (e.g. 32) achieve performances very close to those of maximum-likelihood (ML) decoders. In SCL decoders with large list sizes, however, hardware increase is a severe problem because an SCL decoder with list size L consists of L copies of an SC decoder. In this paper, we present a low-area SCL decoder architecture that applies the proposed merged processing elementsharing (MPES) algorithm. A merged processing element (MPE) is the basic processing unit in SC decoders, and the required number of MPEs is L(N-1) in conventional SCL decoders. Using the proposed algorithm reduces the number of MPEs by about 70% compared with conventional SCL decoders when the list size is larger than 32.