Fast Polarisation-Aware Decoder for Non-Binary Polar Codes

Abstract

The paper investigates the emerging field of low-complexity non-binary polar code (NB-PC) decoders. It shows that customizing each kernel of an NB-PC decoder through offline analysis can significantly reduce the overall decoding complexity. The proposed decoder, referred to as the Fast Successive Cancellation-Polarization Aware (FSC-PA) scheme, achieves this by minimizing the computational load of parity-check nodes that share the same level of input polarization. The NB polar decoder is developed for both BPSK and CCSK modulations. Compared to the state-of-the-art extended min-sum algorithm, the FSC-PA algorithm achieves an overall reduction of 60 percents in field additions and 30 percents in real additions, while incurring only a negligible performance loss (less than 0.2 dB degradation).