Threshold-Based Successive-Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes

This paper focuses on fast successive-cancellation (SC) decoding of polar codes. A threshold-based hard-decision-aided scheme is proposed to speed up the decoding process, especially when the communications channel has low noise. In addition, to eliminate the error-correction performance degradation caused by hard decisions, a backtracking strategy is introduced. Simulation results on a polar code of code length 1024 and rate 1/2 show that, with the help of the proposed scheme, the average decoding latency of existing fast SC decoding algorithms can be reduced by 53% at an Eb/N0 = 5.0 dB with negligible error-correction performance degradation.