SCL-GCD of Short Polar Codes

This paper is concerned with the SCL-GCD algorithm of polar codes, which performs the successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoding algorithm for a lower rate sub-code and the guessing codeword decoding (GCD) algorithm for a higher rate sub-code. We propose to implement the GCD algorithm in a parallel way and design early stopping criteria for reducing complexity and decoding latency without sacrificing performance. Numerical results show that, when compared with the original SCL decoding algorithm, the SCL-GCD algorithm armed with the proposed early stopping criteria has lower computational complexity and decoding latency in the high signal-noise ratio (SNR) region.