An Adaptive Successive Cancellation List Decoder for Polar Codes with Cyclic Redundancy Check

In this letter, we propose an adaptive SC (Successive Cancellation)-List decoder for polar codes with CRC. This adaptive SC-List decoder iteratively increases the list size until at least one survival path can pass CRC. Simulation shows that the adaptive SC-List decoder provides significant complexity reduction. We also demonstrate that polar code (2048, 1024) with 24-bit CRC decoded by our proposed adaptive SC-List decoder with very large maximum list size can achieve a frame error rate FER ≤ 10^-3{-3} at E_b/N_o = 1.1dB, which is about 0.25dB from the information theoretic limit at this block length.