Successive cancellation decoding of polar codes using stochastic computing

Polar codes have emerged as the most favorable channel codes for their unique capacity-achieving property. To date, numerous approaches for efficient decoding of polar codes have been reported. However, these prior efforts focused on design of polar decoders via deterministic computation, while the behavior of stochastic polar decoder, which can have potential advantages such as low complexity and strong error-resilience, has not been studied in existing literatures. This paper, for the first time, investigates polar decoding using stochastic logic. Specifically, the commonly-used successive cancellation (SC) algorithm is reformulated into the stochastic form. Several methods that can potentially improve decoding performance are discussed and analyzed. Simulation results show that a stochastic SC decoder can achieve similar error-correcting performance as its deterministic counterpart. This work can pave the way for future hardware design of stochastic polar codes decoders.