Reduced Path Successive Cancellation List Decoding for Polar Codes

Polar codes have already been adopted in 5G systems to improve error performance. Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding is usually used at the decoder and involves lengthy processing. Therefore, different methods have been developed to reduce an SCL decoder's complexity. In this paper, a reduced path successive cancellation list (RP-SCL) decoder is presented to reduce this complexity, where some decoding paths are pruned. The pruning is achieved by using three different thresholds: two for the path metric and one for the pruning depth in the decoding tree. An optimization procedure is considered to determine the optimum settings for these thresholds. The simulation tests are carried out over models of an additive white Gaussian noise channel and a fading channel by using 5G environments. The results reveal that the proposed RP-SCL decoder provides the complexity reduction in terms of the average number of processed paths at high SNR. Additionally, the computational complexity and the memory requirements decrease.