Bit-Flip Algorithm for Successive Cancellation List Decoder of Polar Codes

A successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder with the assistance of a cyclic redundancy check (CRC) can provide competitive decoding performance for polar codes compared with the state-of-the-art codes. In this paper, we adopt a bit-flip algorithm for the CRC-assisted SCL decoder to further improve the error-correcting performance. We first introduce a new bit-flip criterion for the SCL decoder. To support this criterion, we give the metric to identify the positions that need to be flipped. To verify the superiority of the proposed bit-flip criterion, we also consider a kind of SCL-flip decoder whose criterion is very similar with the existing one and we will prove that its performance is worse than the decoder with the proposed bit-flip criterion. The simulation results show that the decoder with the proposed bit-flip criterion outperforms both the standard CRC-assisted SCL decoder and the existing SCL-based bit-flip decoder.