Iterative Decoding Based on Concatenated Belief Propagation for CRC-Aided Polar Codes

This paper proposes a novel iterative decoder based on concatenated belief propagation (BP) for CRC-aided polar codes. Compared to the conventional BP-based decoders for polar codes, soft cancellation (SCAN) decoder can generate a log likelihood ratio (LLR) of coded bit with lower computational complexity without sacrificing the detection capability. Unfortunately, its performance is not as good as that of CRC-aided successive cancellation list decoder (SCLD) although SCAN decoder has advantage of hardware implementation. To compensate the performance gap, we exploit CRC structure for not only error detection but also error correction with the assistance of its error correction capability at a short code length by exchanging LLRs between SCAN decoder and BP decoder on the basis of CRC. Moreover, the sub-optimal criterion for selecting a parity check matrix of CRC for BP decoder is proposed. Finally, computer simulations are conducted to confirm the validity of our proposed method. The proposed method can obtain the gain of about 0.6 dB at BER=10
^-3
compared to the native SCAN decoder without requiring huge memory size as in SCLD.