Memory reduction techniques for successive cancellation decoding of polar codes

Polar coding is a new coding scheme that asymptotically achieves the capacity of several communication channels. Polar codes can be decoded with a successive cancellation (SC) decoder. In terms of hardware implementation, architectural performance of SC decoders is limited by the memory complexity. In this paper, two complementary methods are proposed to reduce the memory footprint of current state-of-the-art SC decoders. These methods must also applicable to SC-List decoders. The impacts the decoding performance in a rather negligible manner (<0.02dB), as shown by perormed simulations. The association of both methods allows a reduction of 16 ∼35% of the memory complexity for SC decoders depending on their quantization format.