A Method for Low Complexity Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

Abstract: Polar codes have attracted a lot of attention during past few years and have been adopted as a coding scheme for 5G standard. Successive-cancellation list (SCL) decoder provides high level error-correction performance for polar codes, but the implementation complexity grows rapidly with the increase of the list size. Since the computation cost of sorting, many works focus on reducing the sorting complexity for SCL decoder. In this paper, we propose a method for SCL which directly reduce the number of input elements of sorting network without performance loss. Compared with SCL decoder, the proposed method has up to 95\% less sorter size on average, and the performance loss is negligible.