Flexible soft-output decoding of polar codes

In this research, we study soft-output decoding of polar codes. Two representative soft-output decoding algorithms are belief propagation (BP) and soft cancellation (SCAN). The BP algorithm has low latency but suffers from high computational complexity. On the other hand, the SCAN algorithm, which is proposed for reduced complexity of soft-output decoding, achieves good decoding performance but suffers from long latency. These two algorithms are suitable only for two extreme cases that need very low latency (but with high complexity) or very low complexity (but with high latency). However, many practical systems may need to work for the moderate cases (i.e., not too high latency and not too high complexity) rather than two extremes. To adapt to the various needs of the systems, we propose a very flexible soft-output decoding framework of polar codes. Depending on which system requirement is most crucial, the proposed scheme can adapt to the systems by controlling the level of parallelism. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively adapt to various system requirements by changing the level of parallelism.