A Novel SCL Bit-Flipping Decoding Of Polarization-Adjusted Convolutional (PAC) Codes

Abstract: Polar codes have attracted the attention of numerous researchers in the past decade due to their excellent performance. However, their performance at short block lengths under standard successive cancellation decoding is far from desirable. An effective method to improve the performance at short lengths is CRC precoding followed by successive-cancellation list decoding. Later, Arikan presented polarization-adjusted convolutional (PAC) codes, which further improve the performance of polar codes. In fact, bit-flipping is another post-processing method that can improve decoding performance. In this paper, we propose a novel SCL Bit-Flipping of PAC Codes. We show that better performance can be achieved using list decoding when the list size is the same for PAC codes (N=128, K=64). The decoding performance of our newly proposed PAC-SCLF with a list size of 32 is 0.3 dB better than that of the traditional PAC-SCL with a list size of 32. We set the maximum number of bit flips to 5. The performance of the list size (L=32) for PAC-SCLF is almost the same as the performance of the list size (L=128) for PAC-SCL.