Mitigating Clipping Effects on Error Floors under Belief Propagation Decoding of Polar Codes

In this work, we show that polar belief propagation (BP) decoding exhibits an error floor behavior which is caused by clipping of the log-likelihood ratios (LLR). The error floor becomes more pronounced for clipping to smaller LLR-values. We introduce a single-value measure quantifying a "relative error floor", showing, by exhaustive simulations for different lengths, that the error floor is mainly caused by inadequate clipping values. We propose four modifications to the conventional BP decoding algorithm to mitigate this error floor behavior, demonstrating that the error floor is a decoder property, and not a code property. The results agree with the fact that polar codes are theoretically proven to not suffer from error floors. Finally, we show that another cause of error floors can be an improper selection of frozen bit positions.Comment: ISWCS201

Belief Propagation List Decoding of Polar Codes

We propose a belief propagation list (BPL) decoder with comparable performance to the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder of polar codes, which already achieves the maximum likelihood (ML) bound of polar codes for sufficiently large list size $L$. The proposed decoder is composed of multiple parallel independent belief propagation (BP) decoders based on differently permuted polar code factor graphs. A list of possible transmitted codewords is generated and the one closest to the received vector, in terms of Euclidean distance, is picked. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed BPL decoder provides the best performance of plain polar codes under iterative decoding known so far. The proposed algorithm does not require any changes in the polar code structure itself, rendering the BPL into an alternative to the SCL decoder, equipped with a soft output capability enabling, e.g., iterative detection and decoding to further improve performance. Further benefits are lower decoding latency compared to the SCL decoder and the possibility of high throughput implementations. Additionally, we show that a different selection strategy of frozen bit positions can further enhance the error-rate performance of the proposed decoder

Sparse Graphs for Belief Propagation Decoding of Polar Codes

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.Comment: IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) 201

Decoder-tailored Polar Code Design Using the Genetic Algorithm

We propose a new framework for constructing polar codes (i.e., selecting the frozen bit positions) for arbitrary channels, and tailored to a given decoding algorithm, rather than based on the (not necessarily optimal) assumption of successive cancellation (SC) decoding. The proposed framework is based on the Genetic Algorithm (GenAlg), where populations (i.e., collections) of information sets evolve successively via evolutionary transformations based on their individual error-rate performance. These populations converge towards an information set that fits both the decoding behavior and the defined channel. Using our proposed algorithm over the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, we construct a polar code of length 2048 with code rate 0.5, without the CRC-aid, tailored to plain successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding, achieving the same error-rate performance as the CRC-aided SCL decoding, and leading to a coding gain of 1 dB at BER of $10^{-6}$. Further, a 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 total number of low-weight codewords. To demonstrate the flexibility, coding gains for the Rayleigh channel are shown under SCL and BP decoding. Besides improvements in error-rate performance, we show that, when required, the GenAlg can be also set up to reduce the decoding complexity, e.g., the SCL list size or the number of BP iterations can be reduced, while maintaining the same error-rate performance.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Manuscript submitted September 20, 2018; revised January 28, 2019; date of current version January 28, 2019. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1901.0644

TC: Throughput Centric Successive Cancellation Decoder Hardware Implementation for Polar Codes

This paper presents a hardware architecture of fast simplified successive cancellation (fast-SSC) algorithm for polar codes, which significantly reduces the decoding latency and dramatically increases the throughput. Algorithmically, fast-SSC algorithm suffers from the fact that its decoder scheduling and the consequent architecture depends on the code rate; this is a challenge for rate-compatible system. However, by exploiting the homogeneousness between the decoding processes of fast constituent polar codes and regular polar codes, the presented design is compatible with any rate. The scheduling plan and the intendedly designed process core are also described. Results show that, compared with the state-of-art decoder, proposed design can achieve at least 60% latency reduction for the codes with length N = 1024. By using Nangate FreePDK 45nm process, proposed design can reach throughput up to 5.81 Gbps and 2.01 Gbps for (1024, 870) and (1024, 512) polar code, respectively.Comment: submitted to ICASSP 201

Joint Source-Channel Decoding of Polar Codes for Language-Based Source

We exploit the redundancy of the language-based source to help polar decoding. By judging the validity of decoded words in the decoded sequence with the help of a dictionary, the polar list decoder constantly detects erroneous paths after every few bits are decoded. This path-pruning technique based on joint decoding has advantages over stand-alone polar list decoding in that most decoding errors in early stages are corrected. In order to facilitate the joint decoding, we first propose a construction of dynamic dictionary using a trie and show an efficient way to trace the dictionary during decoding. Then we propose a joint decoding scheme of polar codes taking into account both information from the channel and the source. The proposed scheme has the same decoding complexity as the list decoding of polar codes. A list-size adaptive joint decoding is further implemented to largely reduce the decoding complexity. We conclude by simulation that the joint decoding schemes outperform stand-alone polar codes with CRC-aided successive cancellation list decoding by over 0.6 dB.Comment: Single column, 20 pages, 8 figures, to be submitted to ISIT 201

Fast List Decoders for Polar Codes

Polar codes asymptotically achieve the symmetric capacity of memoryless channels, yet their error-correcting performance under successive-cancellation (SC) decoding for short and moderate length codes is worse than that of other modern codes such as low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Of the many methods to improve the error-correction performance of polar codes, list decoding yields the best results, especially when the polar code is concatenated with a cyclic redundancy check (CRC). List decoding involves exploring several decoding paths with SC decoding, and therefore tends to be slower than SC decoding itself, by an order of magnitude in practical implementations. In this paper, we present a new algorithm based on unrolling the decoding tree of the code that improves the speed of list decoding by an order of magnitude when implemented in software. Furthermore, we show that for software-defined radio applications, our proposed algorithm is faster than the fastest software implementations of LDPC decoders in the literature while offering comparable error-correction performance at similar or shorter code lengths.Comment: to appear in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - Special Issue on Recent Advances In Capacity Approaching Codes, 201

A 5.16Gbps decoder ASIC for Polar Code in 16nm FinFET

Polar codes has been selected as 5G standard. However, only a couple of ASIC featuring decoders are fabricated,and none of them support list size L > 4 and code length N > 1024. This paper presents an ASIC implementation of three decoders for polar code: successive cancellation (SC) decoder, flexible decoder and ultra-reliable decoder. These decoders are all SC based decoder, supporting list size up to 1,8,32 and code length up to 2^15,2^14,2^11 respectively. This chip is fabricated in a 16nm TSMC FinFET technology, and can be clocked at 1 Ghz. Optimization techniques are proposed and employed to increase throughput. Experiment result shows that the throughput can achieve up to 5.16Gbps. Compared with fabricated AISC decoder and synthesized decoder in literature, the flexible decoder achieves higher area efficiency

Deep Learning Methods for Improved Decoding of Linear Codes

The problem of low complexity, close to optimal, channel decoding of linear codes with short to moderate block length is considered. It is shown that deep learning methods can be used to improve a standard belief propagation decoder, despite the large example space. Similar improvements are obtained for the min-sum algorithm. It is also shown that tying the parameters of the decoders across iterations, so as to form a recurrent neural network architecture, can be implemented with comparable results. The advantage is that significantly less parameters are required. We also introduce a recurrent neural decoder architecture based on the method of successive relaxation. Improvements over standard belief propagation are also observed on sparser Tanner graph representations of the codes. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the neural belief propagation decoder can be used to improve the performance, or alternatively reduce the computational complexity, of a close to optimal decoder of short BCH codes.Comment: Accepted To IEEE Journal Of Selected Topics In Signal Processin

Multilevel LDPC Lattices with Efficient Encoding and Decoding and a Generalization of Construction D'

Lattice codes are elegant and powerful structures that not only can achieve the capacity of the AWGN channel but are also a key ingredient to many multiterminal schemes that exploit linearity properties. However, constructing lattice codes that can realize these benefits with low complexity is still a challenging problem. In this paper, efficient encoding and decoding algorithms are proposed for multilevel binary LDPC lattices constructed via Construction D' whose complexity is linear in the total number of coded bits. Moreover, a generalization of Construction D' is proposed that relaxes some of the nesting constraints on the parity-check matrices of the component codes, leading to a simpler and improved design. Based on this construction, low-complexity multilevel LDPC lattices are designed whose performance under multistage decoding is comparable to that of polar lattices and close to that of low-density lattice codes (LDLC) on the power-unconstrained AWGN channel.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor