Improved BP decoder for polar codes based on a modified kernel matrix.

Since the polar code was discovered by Arikan, many decoding methods have been proposed, one of which is the belief propagation (BP) decoding. Its inherent high parallel level makes it suitable for high-speed applications. A novel BP decoder based on a modified three-by-three kernel matrix is proposed. The corresponding decoding algorithm and frozen bits selection method are presented. The numerical results show that it has a similar error correcting capability compared with the original polar BP decoder. More importantly, the message memory requirement can be reduced from O(N log2 N) to O (N log3 N), and the decoding delay can be reduced accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]