Fast Successive-Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes with Reed-Solomon Kernel

Polar codes with Reed-Solomon (RS) kernel exhibit significant promise in forthcoming communication systems owing to their elevated polarization rate. However, the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoders for this type of multi-kernel polar codes suffer from high decoding complexity. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the characteristics of the Reed-Solomon (RS) kernel and propose three decoding nodes specifically designed for polar code with RS kernel, including Rate-0, Rate-1 and Quasi-Repetition (QREP) nodes, along with their corre-sponding soft information processing methods. Furthermore, we propose efficient Dual Reliable Decoding (DRD) algorithms and table-based algorithms for Rate-1 and QREP nodes, respectively. Results show that the proposed fast SCL algorithm of polar codes with RS kernel can reduce the complexity, while achieving similar performance.