Neural Network Based Successive Cancellation Decoding Algorithm for Polar Codes in URLLC

Polar codes are considered as a competitive candidate for 5G ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) channel codes, but its strict latency and reliability requirements pose signicant challenges to the existing decoding schemes, especially in terms of decoding latency. In this paper, we propose a neural network based successive cancellation (NN-SC) decoding algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, neural networks are used to replace the local decoders for rate-R constituent codes because of their one-shot decoding capacity, which greatly reduce the decoding latency and algorithmic complexity. The simulation results indicate that the NN-SC decoding algorithm can achieve comparable reliability performance against the successive cancellation (SC) decoding for a polar code of length 128 and rate 1/6, while reducing the decoding latency by 65.2% when compared with the simplified SC decoding. In addition, for two conventional decoding algorithms: SC and belief propagation (BP) decoding, the proposed algorithm can further reduce the decoding latency by 22.8% and 13.8%, respectively.