Belief propagation list decoding for polar codes: Performance analysis and software implementation on GPU

Belief propagation (BP) decoding outputs soft information and can be naturally used in iterative receivers. BP list (BPL) decoding provides comparable error-correction performance to the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding. In this paper, we firstly introduce an enhanced code construction scheme for BPL decoding to improve its error-correction capability. Then, a GPU-based BPL decoder with adoption of the new code construction is presented. Finally, the proposed BPL decoder is tested on NVIDIA RTX3070 and GTX1060. Experimental results show that the presented BPL decoder with early termination criterion achieves above 1 Gbps throughput on RTX3070 for the code (1024, 512) with 32 lists under good channel conditions.