Design and implementation of an enhanced successive cancellation flip decoder and rapid SCF execution-time estimation

Abstract

Modern communication and storage systems require error detection and correction to function properly. Since polar codes are error-correcting codes that can achieve channel capacity, they have been receiving a lot of attention in the past decade. According to current studies, a SC decoder, the first algorithm that was proposed to decode polar codes, can achieve channel capacity. Although SC has good performance in terms of Frame Error Rate (FER) for infinite block length, with short to moderate length codes, this decoding algorithm has an error-correction performance that leaves to be desired. For these cases, various decoding algorithms were proposed to improve the error-correction performance such as SCF. The SCF decoder has superior performance, however, its variable execution time makes hardware implementation more complex, since the hardware should be designed to withstand worst-case execution times to prevent buffer overflow. In this thesis, first, a new decoding algorithm named ESCF is proposed which is based on SCF that reduces the average execution time while maintaining the error-correction performance of the SCF decoder. Our simulation results show that the execution time is reduced especially at lower SNRs at the cost of a small sacrifice in memory requirements. In the second part of the thesis, we focus on proposing a simple but effective method that predicts the execution time of SCF and identifies the sensitivity of the execution time from various parameters such as block length, code rate, and the CRC length. A low-complexity mechanism was also developed to determine statistics related to the number of trials needed in various situations to decode a frame. This method is to be used as a building block in future works.

Date	29 Nov 2021
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Pascal Giard (Supervisor)