Polar codes are a channel coding scheme for the next generation of wireless
communications standard (5G). The belief propagation (BP) decoder allows for
parallel decoding of polar codes, making it suitable for high throughput
applications. However, the error-correction performance of polar codes under BP
decoding is far from the requirements of 5G. It has been shown that the
error-correction performance of BP can be improved if the decoding is performed
on multiple permuted factor graphs of polar codes. However, a different BP
decoding scheduling is required for each factor graph permutation which results
in the design of a different decoder for each permutation. Moreover, the
selection of the different factor graph permutations is at random, which
prevents the decoder to achieve a desirable error-correction performance with a
small number of permutations. In this paper, we first show that the
permutations on the factor graph can be mapped into suitable permutations on
the codeword positions. As a result, we can make use of a single decoder for
all the permutations. In addition, we introduce a method to construct a set of
predetermined permutations which can provide the correct codeword if the
decoding fails on the original permutation. We show that for the 5G polar code
of length 1024, the error-correction performance of the proposed decoder is
more than 0.25 dB better than that of the BP decoder with the same number of
random permutations at the frame error rate of 10β4