Polar codes represent one of the major recent breakthroughs in coding theory
and, because of their attractive features, they have been selected for the
incoming 5G standard. As such, a lot of attention has been devoted to the
development of decoding algorithms with good error performance and efficient
hardware implementation. One of the leading candidates in this regard is
represented by successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoding. However, its
hardware implementation requires a large amount of memory. Recently, a
partitioned SCL (PSCL) decoder has been proposed to significantly reduce the
memory consumption. In this paper, we examine the paradigm of PSCL decoding
from both theoretical and practical standpoints: (i) by changing the
construction of the code, we are able to improve the performance at no
additional computational, latency or memory cost, (ii) we present an optimal
scheme to allocate cyclic redundancy checks (CRCs), and (iii) we provide an
upper bound on the list size that allows MAP performance.Comment: 2017 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM