Software polar decoder on an embedded processor

This paper presents the software implementation of a Polar Codes decoder on an embedded processor. An efficient use of computation and memory resource is made in order to devise a fast polar decoder on an embedded ARM processor. Memory footprint reduction and algorithmic simplifications are applied in order to increase the throughput of the decoder. The NEON instruction set of ARM processors is used to exploit the parallelism of the algorithm. The resulting decoder description is implemented on a Cortex A9 ARM processor. The throughput of the resulting decoder is reported and discussed for several parameters : the code rate, the code length and the multithreading mode. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported implementation of a polar decoder on an embedded processor core. The proposed software decoder reaches >100Mbps for a codelength of 16K. Moreover, it compares favorably with state of the art LDPC decoders implemented on embedded processors.