List Selection and Decision Fusion Scheme for Belief Propagation List Decoding of Polar Codes

To the best of our knowledge, Belief Propagation List (BPL) decoding achieves the best error-correction performance within the class of BP based polar code decoding algorithms. It regards different permutations of the polar code factor graph as a range of available "decoding lists" for individually executing the BP algorithm. Then, a minimum Euclidean distance criterion is employed to combine these individual decisions. However, we demonstrated that simply increasing the number of lists involved in the BPL algorithm does not always improve its performance. Instead, we exploit the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart technology to verify the efficiency of a decoding list. Based on this analysis, an efficient list selection scheme is proposed. In the same spirit, in order to mitigate the impact of relatively inferior decoding lists on other selected decoding lists, new decision fusion schemes are also designed. Benefiting from these improvements of BPL algorithm, performance gains are evidenced in our simulation results.