A Dynamic Adaptive SCL Decoding for Polar Codes Based on Frozen Bits

Polar codes in 5G new radio (5G NR) have been extensively investigated as a crucial channel coding technique in the field of channel coding and decoding. In this paper, we leverage the property of frozen bits in polar codes to enhance the successive-cancellation-list (SCL) decoding of polar codes. This enables adaptive adjustment of the list size with minimal additional redundancy. Our novel approach, called Dynamic Adaptive (DA) SCL decoding, exploits the check properties exhibited by certain frozen bits in polar codes to precisely assess the reliability of pre-coding, thus determining whether list decoding is necessary and what size of list is required. Simulation results demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance to existing decoding techniques with lower computational complexity. As demand grows within the 5G NR ecosystem for efficient and high-performance decoding methods, our DA-SCL decoding presents a promising solution poised to make significant contributions to seamless and reliable data transmission in the next generation (6G) networks.