Input-Distribution-Aware Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

Polar codes are linear block codes that can achieve channel capacity at infinite code length. Successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding relies on a set of parallel decoders; it yields good error-correction performance at finite code length, at the cost of increased implementation complexity and power consumption. Current efforts in literature focus on design-time decoder complexity reduction, while lacking practical run-time power reduction methods. In this work, input-distribution-aware SCL (IDA-SCL) decoding is proposed, that allows to determine the parallelism to adopt by performing simple observations on the input of the decoder. This technique guarantees fixed, short latency and allows hardware SCL decoders to dynamically shut down part of the internal parallelism before each decoding process. It can be combined with existing complexity- and power- reduction techniques. Simulation results show that IDA-SCL can reduce the run-time complexity of SCL of up to 50%.