Multi-Bit Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes Using One-Bit Error Boundary

This letter proposes an efficient method to reduce path splits in the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding. We construct the boundary consisting of single-bit and multi-bit nodes that have a low error probability within the SC-decoding tree. The nodes on the boundary are considered with only two candidates per path instead of descending to their child nodes. To establish the boundary, we investigate the error probability of multi-bit nodes in the SC-decoding tree. The proposed method reduces the overall decoding cycles by approximately 70% while maintaining almost the same error-correcting performance as the conventional SCL decoding method.