Efficient adaptive list successive cancellation decoder for polar codes

By keeping a size-L list of intermediate candidates at each decoding step, list successive cancellation (SC) polar decoder successfully achieves better performance compared to the conventional SC polar decoder. However, the size-L list SC decoder will result in linear increase of hardware complexity, which hinders the efficient implementation and therefore the wide application of it. To this end, an efficient adaptive list SC decoder for polar codes is proposed in this paper. Simulation results have demonstrated that for (1024, 512) rate-½ polar code, the proposed adaptive size-2 and size-4 list decoders can achieve 37.6% and 17.0% computational complexity reduction at point SNR = 2.0 dB compared to the conventional ones, respectively. Hardware architecture for the proposed adaptive list decoder is also proposed in detail.