Parity Check Aided SC-Flip Decoding Algorithms for Polar Codes

When polar codes are decoded by the successive cancellation (SC) decoding algorithm, erroneously decoded non-frozen bits are caused by either channel noise or error propagation. SC-Flip algorithms aim to improve error performance by first identifying erroneous hard decisions due to channel noise and then flipping them during the decoding process to reduce error propagation. In existing SC-Flip algorithms, cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is used to check the decoded codeword to detect incorrect hard decisions. Differing from this detection approach based on CRC, we propose new SC-Flip decoders that take advantage of both the CRC and distributed parity checks (PCs) to detect, identify and flip erroneously decoded non-frozen bits. The proposed decoders terminate SC decoding early when a distributed PC is not satisfied. In addition, we propose a new metric to help locate the incorrect hard decisions. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that our SC-Flip decoders achieve better performance complexity tradeoffs than prior flipping algorithms, and approach the performance and complexity of the SC-Oracle algorithms.