Improved Soft Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes

The soft cancellation decoding of polar codes achieves a better performance than the belief propagation decoding with lower computational time and space complexities. However, because the soft cancellation decoding is based on the successive cancellation decoding, the decoding efficiency and performance with finite-length blocks can be further improved. Exploiting the idea of the successive cancellation list decoding, the soft cancellation decoding can be improved in two aspects: one is by adding branch decoding to the error-prone information bits to increase the accuracy of the soft information, and the other is through using partial iterative decoding to reduce the time and computational complexities. Compared with the original method, the improved soft cancellation decoding makes progress in the error correction performance, increasing the decoding efficiency and reducing the computational complexity, at the cost of a small increase of space complexity.