A method to enhance the performance of successive cancellation decoding in polar codes

Polar codes are regarded as a major breakthrough in modern channel coding since they are capacity-achieving using simple successive cancellation (SC) decoding. However, this is only possible with significantly large code lengths which may not be applicable for many systems. In this paper, we focus on short length polar codes and present a method which can enhance the performance of the successive cancellation decoder. For the purpose of analysis, we discuss the SC code tree and show how the proposed method can improve the performance by increasing the computational nodes in the code tree. The results quantify the achieved performance improvement over the conventional SC decoder.