Software Implementation and Performance of a Computational Complexity Reduced Belief Propagation Polar Code Decoder

The belief propagation algorithm is one of the preferred algorithms for a polar code based decoder that can potentially achieve the lowest latency. Although belief propagation polar code algorithms have the ability for a highly parallelized implementation, they require more iterations to achieve a comparable frame error rate and bit error rate compared to the successive cancellation polar code algorithm. The iterative nature of the belief propagation algorithms also results in a higher computational complexity, i.e. O(N(2log
2
N-1)) compared to the computational complexity O(Nlog
2
N) of the successive cancellation decoder algorithm. In this paper we propose several software implementations of belief propagation polar code decoders using the computational complexity reduced belief propagation algorithm and the enhanced loop-weakened belief propagation algorithm, to increase the number of decoded codes per second. Compared to a baseline belief propagation implementation, our proposed radix-2 and radix-4 implementations increase the throughput by approximately 15.4% and 22.04% respectively. This gain is the result of a reduction of arithmetic operations, i.e., additions, compares, and multiplications, which is obtained without a loss in error-correcting performance.