A Soft Cancellation Decoder for Parity-Check Polar Codes

Abstract: Polar codes has been selected as the channel coding scheme for 5G new radio (NR) control channel. Specifically, a special type of parity-check polar (PC-Polar) codes was adopted in uplink control information (UCI). In this paper, we propose a parity-check soft-cancellation (PC-SCAN) algorithm and its simplified version to decode PC-Polar codes. The potential benefits are two-fold. First, PC-SCAN can provide soft output for PC-Polar codes, which is essential for advanced turbo receivers. Second, the decoding performance is better than that of successive cancellation (SC). This is due to the fact that parity-check constraints can be exploited by PC-SCAN to enhance the reliability of other information bits over the iterations. Moreover, we describe a cyclic-shift-register (CSR) based implementation "CSR-SCAN" to reduce both hardware cost and latency with minimum performance loss.