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An Efficient Software List Sphere Decoder for Polar Codes

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Abstract

Polar codes, first achieving the capacity of symmetric binary-input discrete memoryless channels (B-DMCs), have been standardized for eMBB control channels. Since 5G cellular requires flexible architecture which is realized by the software defined networking paradigm, efficient polar decoder is anticipated. Though successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder achieves satisfactory performance, it requires a large amount of memory. For short control channel codes, sphere decoder (SD) is an alternative, but costs unbearable time complexity at low signal-to-noise ratio. List sphere decoder (LSD) abandons the radius and keeps a list of best paths to gain a fixed complexity. However, LSD needs a large list size L for satisfactory performance. In this paper, an efficient software LSD with path pruning and efficient sorting is proposed. We recall the radius as the bound to delete the paths out of the sphere at very early levels. Since L is dynamic, efficient sorting is proposed to reduce the copy operations. Implemented with C++, the proposed decoder can reduce up to 65.3% latency compared with the original LSD, with the same performance and lower complexity.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by NSFC under Grants 61871115 and 61501116, in part by the Jiangsu Provincial NSF for Excellent Young Scholars under Grant BK20180059, in part by the Six Talent Peak Program of Jiangsu Province under Grant 2018-DZXX-001, in part by the Distinguished Perfection Professorship of Southeast University, in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, in part by the SRTP of Southeast University, and in part by the Project Sponsored by the SRF for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars of MoE.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Efficient Architectures for Digital-communication and Signal-processing (LEADS) of Southeast University, the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory of Southeast University, Quantum Information Center of Southeast University, and the Purple Mountain Laboratories, Nanjing, 210096, China

    Huayi Zhou, Zaichen Zhang, Xiaohu You & Chuan Zhang

  2. School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Yuxiang Fu

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, Montréal, Canada

    Warren J. Gross

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  1. Huayi Zhou
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  2. Yuxiang Fu
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  3. Zaichen Zhang
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  4. Warren J. Gross
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  5. Xiaohu You
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  6. Chuan Zhang
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Correspondence to Chuan Zhang.

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Zhou, H., Fu, Y., Zhang, Z. et al. An Efficient Software List Sphere Decoder for Polar Codes. J Sign Process Syst 92, 517–528 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-019-01506-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-019-01506-0

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