Cryptography and coding: 15th IMA international conference, IMACC 2015 Oxford, UK, December 15-17, 2015 proceedings

LIBERATORI, M. C.; ARNONE, L. J.; CASTIÑEIRA MOREIRA, J.; FARRELL, P. G.

LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE

Springer Verlag

Año: 2015 vol. 9496 p. 173 - 183

0302-9743

In this paper, we implement the Successive Cancellation (SC)decoding algorithm for Polar Codes by using Euclidean distance estimatesas the metric of the algorithm. This implies conversion of theclassic statistical recursive expressions of the SC decoder into a suitableform, adapting them to the proposed metric, and properly expressingthe initialization values for this metric. This leads to a simplified versionof the logarithmic SC decoder, which offers the advantage that the algorithmcan be directly initialised with the values of the received channelsamples. Simulations of the BER performance of the SC decoder, usingboth the classic statistical metrics, and the proposed Euclidean distancemetric, show that there is no significant loss in BER performance for theproposed method in comparison with the classic implementation. Calculationsare simplified at the initialization step of the algorithm, since neitheris there a need to know the noise power variance of the channel, norto perform complex and costly mathematical operations like exponentiations,quotients and products at that step. This complexity reductionis especially important for practical implementations of the SC decodingalgorithm in programmable logic technology like Field ProgrammableGate Arrays (FPGAs).