Improved Polar SCL Decoding by Exploiting the Error Correction Capability of CRC

Novel successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding schemes of Polar codes by exploiting the error correction (EC) capability of the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes are proposed in this paper. Different from the schemes in the literature that only considered the error detection capability of CRC, the proposed schemes aim to improve the performance of CRC-aided Polar decoding to the most by benefiting from the potential EC capability of CRC. Specifically, we first propose a basic decoding scheme, named CRC error-correction-aided successive cancellation list (CRC-EC-SCL) decoding, by introducing the look-up-table-based CRC EC method into the Polar SCL decoding process. Then, based on the basic scheme, we further propose the segmented-CRC-EC-SCL decoding scheme. By segmented-CRC, the information block is divided into multiple segments and each segment is attached with a shorter CRC sequence. By conducting the CRC-EC-aided coding for each of the segments, multiple erroneous bits can be corrected early and error propagation can, thus, be efficiently suppressed. The simulation results show that both of the proposed decoding schemes have a significant performance gain over the classic CRC-EC-SCL decoding scheme. Especially for the segmented-CRC-EC-SCL, the performance gain at a frame error rate of 10
⁻⁴
is about 0.4 dB. Moreover, the average computation complexity of the segmented-CRC-EC-SCL is close to the classic scheme.