Successive Cancellation Creeper Decoding of Polar Codes

In this paper, an improvement for successive cancellation (SC) decoding is presented for polar codes. This improvement is based on applying Creeper approach that was used to decode convolutional codes. The proposed decoder combines a stack and a Fano approaches and allows to significantly decrease complexity of Successive Cancellation Fano decoder at the cost of a slight increase in space complexity. We also show how to combine SC-Creeper decoding with bit-flipping approach to further improve the performance of SC-Creeper due to introducing additional decoding attempts.Simulation results provided in this paper show that proposed SC-Creeper and SC-Creeper Flip decoders with carefully selected parameters have the same performance as both Successive Cancellation List decoder with list size 8 and Fano decoder, while having much smaller complexity.