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Fast and Flexible Software Polar List Decoders

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Abstract

Flexibility is one mandatory aspect of channel coding in modern wireless communication systems. Among other things, the channel decoder has to support several code lengths and code rates. This need for flexibility applies to polar codes that are considered for control channels in the future 5G standard. This paper presents a new generic and flexible implementation of a software Successive Cancellation List (SCL) decoder. A large set of parameters can be fine-tuned dynamically without re-compiling the software source code: the code length, the code rate, the frozen bits set, the puncturing patterns, the cyclic redundancy check, the list size, the type of decoding algorithm, the tree-pruning strategy and the data quantization. This generic and flexible SCL decoder enables to explore tradeoffs between throughput, latency and decoding performance. Several optimizations are proposed to achieve a competitive decoding speed despite the constraints induced by the genericity and the flexibility. The resulting polar list decoder is about 4 times faster than previous generic software decoders and only 2 times slower than previous non-flexible unrolled decoders. Thanks to the flexibility of the decoder, the fully adaptive SCL algorithm can be easily implemented and achieves higher throughput than any other similar decoder in the literature, up to 425 Mb/s on a single processor core for N = 2048 and K = 1723 at 4.5 dB.

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Notes

  1. \(F^{\otimes 1} = \left [\begin {array}{cc} 1 & 0 \\ 1 & 1 \end {array}\right ] \) and \(\forall n > 1, F^{\otimes n} = \left [\begin {array}{cc} F^{\otimes n - 1} & 0_{n-1} \\ F^{\otimes n - 1} & F^{\otimes n - 1} \end {array}\right ]\), where n = log2(N), N is the codeword length, and 0n is a 2n-by-2n matrix of zeros.

  2. AFF3CT is an Open-source software (MIT license) for fast forward error correction simulations, see http://aff3ct.github.io.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Prompt, and Huawei Technologies Canada Co. Ltd. for financial support to this project. This work was also supported by a grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR), ANR-15-CE25-0006-01.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IMS Laboratory, UMR CNRS 5218, Bordeaux INP, University of Bordeaux, Talence, France

    Mathieu Léonardon, Adrien Cassagne, Camille Leroux & Christophe Jégo

  2. Polytechnique Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Mathieu Léonardon & Yvon Savaria

  3. Inria, Bordeaux Institute of Technology, LaBRI/CNRS, Bordeaux, France

    Adrien Cassagne

  4. Huawei Technologies Canada Co. LTD, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Louis-Philippe Hamelin

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  1. Mathieu Léonardon
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  2. Adrien Cassagne
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Correspondence to Mathieu Léonardon.

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Léonardon, M., Cassagne, A., Leroux, C. et al. Fast and Flexible Software Polar List Decoders. J Sign Process Syst 91, 937–952 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-018-1430-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-018-1430-3

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