An Error Segment Bit-Flip Algorithm for Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

Polar codes have garnered significant attention since they were proposed due to their capacity-achieving properties and their low-complexity decoding process, and they were selected as the coding scheme for the control channel in 5G mobile communication technology. A successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder, aided by a cyclic redundancy check (CRC), performs the competitive error correcting performance for polar codes compared to other sophisticated codes. The SCL-Flip decoding algorithm is proposed to enhance the error correction performance of the SCL. However, the SCL-Flip is hampered by a high decoding complexity due to the necessary selection and sorting process of path metrics (PMs). Additionally, it requires a large number of iterations to achieve a good error correction performance. In this paper, we propose the error segment bit-flip (ES-SCL-Flip) decoding algorithm, a simplified bit-flip approach for the SCL decoder based on analyzing the distributions of the first error bit. Firstly, we construct an index set with a high probability of the first erroneous bit. Second, a bit-flip criterion is introduced to prevent the costly operation of the PM selection and sorting without compromising the error correction performance. Finally, a search strategy is employed that utilizes segmented error indication to target and rectify the initial error segment sequentially. The simulation results demonstrate that the ES-SCL-Flip decoder provides an improved error correction performance with only a minimal increase in decoding complexity compared to the conventional CRC-aided SCL decoder. This algorithm attains a commendable equilibrium between the error correction performance and decoding complexity.