Permutation decoding gained recent interest as it can exploit the symmetries of a code in a parallel fashion. Moreover, it has been shown that by viewing permuted polar codes as polar subcodes, the set of usable permutations in permutation decoding can be increased. We extend this idea to pre-transformed polar codes, such as cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-aided polar codes, which previously could not be decoded using permutations due to their lack of automorphisms. Using belief propagation (BP)-based subdecoders, we showcase a performance close to CRC-aided SCL (CA-SCL) decoding. The proposed algorithm outperforms the previously best performing iterative CRC-aided belief propagation list (CA-BPL) decoder both in error-rate performance and decoding latency.

The automorphism group of a code is the set of permutations of the codeword symbols that map the whole code onto itself. For polar codes, only a part of the automorphism group was known, namely the lower-triangular affine group (LTA), which is solely based upon the partial order of the code's synthetic channels. Depending on the design, however, polar codes can have a richer set of automorphisms. In this paper, we extend the LTA to a larger subgroup of the general affine group (GA), namely the block lower-triangular affine group (BLTA) and show that it is contained in the automorphism group of polar codes. Furthermore, we provide a low complexity algorithm for finding this group for a given information/frozen set and determining its size. Most importantly, we apply these findings in automorphism-based decoding of polar codes and report a comparable error-rate performance to that of successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding with significantly lower complexity.

Reed–Muller (RM) codes are known for their good maximum likelihood (ML) performance in the short block-length regime. Despite being one of the oldest classes of channel codes, finding a low complexity soft-input decoding scheme is still an open problem. In this work, we present a versatile decoding architecture for RM codes based on their rich automorphism group. The decoding algorithm can be seen as a generalization of multiple-bases belief propagation (MBBP) and may use any polar or RM decoder as constituent decoders. We provide extensive error-rate performance simulations for successive cancellation (SC)-, SC-list (SCL)- and belief propagation (BP)-based constituent decoders. We furthermore compare our results to existing decoding schemes and report a near-ML performance for the RM(3,7)-code (e.g., 0.04 dB away from the ML bound at BLER of 10−3) at a competitive computational cost. Moreover, we provide some insights into the automorphism subgroups of RM codes and SC decoding and, thereby, prove the theoretical limitations of this method with respect to polar codes.

Although iterative decoding of polar codes has recently made huge progress based on the idea of permuted factor graphs, it still suffers from a non-negligible performance degradation when compared to state-of-the-art CRC-aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoding. In this work, we show that iterative decoding of polar codes based on the belief propagation list (BPL) algorithm can approach the error-rate performance of CA-SCL decoding and, thus, can be efficiently used for decoding the standardized 5G polar codes. Rather than only utilizing the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) as a stopping condition (i.e., for error-detection), we also aim to benefit from the error-correction capabilities of the outer CRC code. For this, we develop two distinct soft-decision CRC decoding algorithms: a Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR)-based approach and a sum product algorithm (SPA)-based approach. Further, an optimized selection of permuted factor graphs is analyzed and shown to reduce the decoding complexity significantly. Finally, we benchmark the proposed CRC-aided belief propagation list (CA-BPL) decoding to state-of-the-art 5G polar codes under CA-SCL decoding and, thereby, showcase an error-rate performance not just close to the CA-SCL but also close to the maximum likelihood (ML) bound as estimated by ordered statistic decoding (OSD).

Previous work showed that polar codes can be decoded using off-the-shelf LDPC decoders by imposing special constraints on the LDPC code structure, which, however, resulted in some performance degradation. In this paper we show that this loss can be mitigated; in particular, we demonstrate how the gap between LDPC-style decoding and Arıkan's Belief Propagation (BP) decoding of polar codes can be closed by taking into account the underlying graph structure of the LDPC decoder while jointly designing the polar code and the parity-check matrix of the corresponding LDPC-like code. The resulting polar codes under conventional LDPC-style decoding are shown to have similar error-rate performance when compared to some well-known and standardized LDPC codes. Moreover, we obtain performance gains in the high SNR region.

We present a new framework for constructing polar codes (i.e., selecting the frozen bit positions) for arbitrary channels, tailored to a given decoding algorithm rather than assuming the (not necessarily optimal) successive cancellation (SC) decoding. The proposed framework is based on the genetic algorithm (GenAlg), where populations (i.e., collections) of information sets evolve via evolutionary transformations based on their individual error-rate performance. These populations converge toward an information set that fits both the decoding behavior and the defined channel. We construct polar codes, without the CRC-aid, tailored to plain successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding, achieving the same error-rate performance as the CRC-aided SCL decoding over both the AWGN channel and the Rayleigh channel, respectively. Furthermore, a proposed belief propagation (BP)-tailored construction approaches the SCL error-rate performance without any modifications in the decoding algorithm itself. The performance gains can be attributed to the significant reduction in the number of low-weight codewords. We show that, when required, the GenAlg can also be set up to find codes that reduce the decoding complexity. This way, the SCL list size or the number of BP iterations can be reduced while maintaining the same error-rate performance.

We introduce the Scattered Extrinsic Information Transfer (S-EXIT) chart as a tool for optimizing degree profiles of short length Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes under iterative decoding. As degree profile optimization is typically done in the asymptotic length regime, there is space for further improvement when considering the finite length behavior. We propose to consider the average extrinsic information as a random variable, exploiting its specific distribution properties for guiding code design. We explain, step-by-step, how to generate an S-EXIT chart for short-length LDPC codes. We show that this approach achieves gains in terms of bit error rate (BER) of 0.5 dB and 0.6 dB over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel for codeword lengths of 128 and 180 bits, respectively, at a target BER of 10-4 when compared to conventional Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart-based optimization. Also, a performance gain for the Binary Erasure Channel (BEC) for a block (i.e., codeword) length of 180 bits is shown.

We describe a novel approach to interpret a polar code as a low-density parity-check (LDPC)-like code with an underlying sparse decoding graph. This sparse graph is based on the encoding factor graph of polar codes and is suitable for conventional belief propagation (BP) decoding. We discuss several pruning techniques based on the check node decoder (CND) and variable node decoder (VND) update equations, significantly reducing the size (i.e., decoding complexity) of the parity-check matrix. As a result, iterative polar decoding can then be conducted on a sparse graph, akin to the traditional well-established LDPC decoding, e.g., using a fully parallel sum-product algorithm (SPA). This facilitates the systematic analysis and design of polar codes using the well-established tools known from analyzing LDPC codes. We show that the proposed iterative polar decoder has a negligible performance loss for short-to-intermediate codelengths compared to Arikan's original BP decoder. Finally, the proposed decoder is shown to benefit from both reduced complexity and reduced memory requirements and, thus, is more suitable for hardware implementations.

We show that the performance of iterative belief propagation (BP) decoding of polar codes can be enhanced by decoding over different carefully chosen factor graph realizations. With a genie-aided stopping condition, it can achieve the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding performance which has already been shown to achieve the maximum likelihood (ML) bound provided that the list size is sufficiently large. The proposed decoder is based on different realizations of the polar code factor graph with randomly permuted stages during decoding. Additionally, a different way of visualizing the polar code factor graph is presented, facilitating the analysis of the underlying factor graph and the comparison of different graph permutations. In our proposed decoder, a high rate Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) code is concatenated with a polar code and used as an iteration stopping criterion (i.e., genie) to even outperform the SCL decoder of the plain polar code (without the CRC-aid). Although our permuted factor graph-based decoder does not outperform the SCL-CRC decoder, it achieves, to the best of our knowledge, the best performance of all iterative polar decoders presented thus far.

For finite length polar codes, channel polarization leaves a significant number of channels not fully polarized. Adding a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) to better protect information on the semi-polarized channels has already been successfully applied in the literature, and is straightforward to be used in combination with Successive Cancellation List (SCL) decoding. Belief Propagation (BP) decoding, however, offers more potential for exploiting parallelism in hardware implementation, and thus, we focus our attention on improving the BP decoder. Specifically, similar to the CRC strategy in the SCL-case, we use a short-length “auxiliary” LDPC code together with the polar code to provide a significant improvement in terms of BER. We present the novel concept of “scattered” EXIT charts to design such auxiliary LDPC codes, and achieve net coding gains (i.e. for the same total rate) of 0.4dB at BER of 10-5compared to the conventional BP decoder.