Low-Complexity Soft-Output Decoding of Polar Codes

The state-of-the-art soft-output decoder for polar codes is a message-passing algorithm based on belief propagation, which performs well at the cost of high processing and storage requirements. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity alternative for soft-output decoding of polar codes that offers better performance but with significantly reduced processing and storage requirements. In particular we show that the complexity of the proposed decoder is only 4% of the total complexity of the belief propagation decoder for a rate one-half polar code of dimension 4096 in the dicode channel, while achieving comparable error-rate performance. Furthermore, we show that the proposed decoder requires about 39% of the memory required by the belief propagation decoder for a block length of 32768.