CRC-Aided Decoding of Polar Codes

CRC (cyclic redundancy check)-aided decoding schemes are proposed to improve the performance of polar codes. A unified description of successive cancellation decoding and its improved version with list or stack is provided and the CRC-aided successive cancellation list/stack (CA-SCL/SCS) decoding schemes are proposed. Simulation results in binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel (BI-AWGNC) show that CA-SCL/SCS can provide significant gain of 0.5 dB over the turbo codes used in 3GPP standard with code rate 1/2 and code length 1024 at the block error probability (BLER) of 10^-4. Moreover, the time complexity of CA-SCS decoder is much lower than that of turbo decoder and can be close to that of successive cancellation (SC) decoder in the high SNR regime.