Generalized SCL-Flip Decoding of Polar Codes

In this paper, two improvements for successive cancellation list flip (SCL-Flip) decoding are presented for polar codes. First, a novel bit-selection metric based on path metric (PM) is introduced. With the proposed metric, the improved scheme can have lower complexity and saturate faster than other state-of-the-art decoders. Second, we generalize the SCLFlip decoding, denoted SCL-Flip -\omega, to flip the decision in path competition at most \omega times in decoding process. We analyze the frequency of channel-induced error under various circumstances, measure the trade-off between error-correction performance and complexity, and then propose SCL-Flip-2 decoding which is the first SCL-based decoding that allows for multiple bits for flipping to the best of our knowledge. Simulation results reveal that the proposed decoding with a small list size can achieve a better performance than CA-SCL decoding with a large list size while keeping the complexity low.