Adaptive Belief Propagation Decoding of CRC Concatenated NR LDPC and Polar Codes

In this paper, we propose a modified adaptive belief propagation (ABP) algorithm, which is referred to as the random ABP (R-ABP) algorithm, for decoding short channel codes adopted in the fifth generation (5G) New Radio (NR) wireless systems. Based on the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) concatenation structure of 5G channel codes, we can take partial or even all CRC bits into iterative R-ABP decoding to improve the error correction performance, while the error detection capability can still be guaranteed by the remaining CRC bits and a proposed threshold-based acceptance criterion. We call this improved R-ABP decoding the threshold-and-CRC-aided R-ABP (TCA-R-ABP) decoding. The simulation results show that our proposed TCA-R-ABP algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art decoding algorithms for many 5G low-density parity-check (LDPC) and polar codes. Moreover, the proposed TCA-R-ABP algorithm leads to a unified decoder for LDPC and polar codes, which has the potential to be a lower-complexity decoder over the combination of the belief propagation (BP) and CRC-aided successive cancellation list (CA-SCL) decoders.