Multiple candidates successive-cancellation decoding of polar codes

This paper proposes an effective scheme to improve the error performance of conventional successive-cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm for polar codes. The proposed scheme, which is referred to as the multiple candidates (MC) scheme constructs a set of candidates for the starting vector for SC decoding. Each candidate vector in the set is generated by adding a random offset of the original received vector. Simulation results show that conventional SC decoding algorithm applying the MC scheme achieves noticeable gains over the original SC algorithms with reasonable increase in computational cost.