A Low Complexity Segmented Parity SC Flip Decoding Algorithm for Polar Codes

The Successive Cancellation decoder cannot provide satisfactory error correcting performance for finite length polar codes. The error performance can be improved by using Successive Cancellation Flip decoders at the expense of higher complexity. In line with this, a novel decoding approach has been developed in this paper, where distributed parity bits are used to divide the codeword into multiple segments having equal probability of error occurrence, allowing early termination. The proposed Segmented Parity Successive Cancellation Flip (SP-SC Flip) Decoder achieves lower normalized complexity and average decoding latency compared to some related existing decoders, without degrading the error correcting performance. Further improvement in decoder performance is observed when code words are divided into a greater number of segments.