TITLE:
Improved Polar Decoder Utilizing Neural Network in Fast Simplified Successive-Cancellation Decoding
AUTHORS:
Jiaxin Fang, Chunwu Liu
KEYWORDS:
Polar Codes, Decoding Latency, Fast Simplified Successive-Cancellation Decoding (Fast-SSC), Neural Network (NN)
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Computer and Communications,
Vol.8 No.7,
July
31,
2020
ABSTRACT:
Polar codes using successive-cancellation decoding always suffer from high latency for its serial nature. Fast simplified successive-cancellation decoding algorithm improves the situation in theoretically but not performs well as expected in practical for the workload of nodes identification and the existence of many short blocks. Meanwhile, Neural network (NN) based decoders have appeared as potential candidates to replace conventional decoders for polar codes. But the exponentially increasing training complexity with information bits is unacceptable which means it is only suitable for short codes. In this paper, we present an improvement that increases decoding efficiency without degrading the error-correction performance. The long polar codes are divided into several sub-blocks, some of which can be decoded adopting fast maximum likelihood decoding method and the remained parts are replaced by several short codes NN decoders. The result shows that time steps the proposed algorithm need only equal to 79.8% of fast simplified successive-cancellation decoders require. Moreover, it has up to 21.2 times faster than successive-cancellation decoding algorithm. More importantly, the proposed algorithm decreases the hardness when applying in some degree.