Simplified Stage-Combined Belief Propagation Decoding of Polar Codes

Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm is suitable for high-throughput decoding of polar codes due to its inherent parallelism. However, compared with Successive Cancellation (SC)-based decoding methods, BP-based schemes fall behind in terms of Bit-Error Rate (BER) performance. In this paper, a simplified stage-combined BP decoding algorithm is proposed that not only reduces decoding latency, but also improves BER performance. Theoretically, decoding latency can be halved with the proposed method, while the BER performance could be improved by 1 dB in some instances of polar codes. Furthermore, the average number of iterations for achieving a specific BER performance is either reduced or remains the same as the baseline decoding method.