Dynamic-SCFlip Decoding of Polar Codes

This paper proposes a generalization of the recently introduced successive cancellation flip (SCFlip) decoding of polar codes, characterized by a number of extra decoding attempts, where one or several positions are flipped from the standard SC decoding. To make such an approach effective, we first introduce the concept of higher order bit flips and propose a new metric to determine the bit flips that are more likely to correct the trajectory of the SC decoding. We then propose a generalized SCFlip decoding algorithm, referred to as dynamic-SCFlip (D-SCFlip), which dynamically builds a list of candidate bit flips, while guaranteeing that the next attempt has the highest probability of success among the remaining ones. Simulation results show that D-SCFlip is an effective alternative to SC-list decoding of polar codes, by providing very good error correcting performance, with an average computation complexity close to the one of the SC decoder.