Simulated Annealing Algorithm-Aided SC Decoder for Polar Codes

Abstract

A new decoding scheme aided by simulated annealing algorithm is proposed to further improve the decoding performance of successive cancellation (SC) for polar codes at the short block. We use simulated annealing to revise the decoding result of SC which cannot pass the CRC check. To generate the new neighbors, the decoder flips one bit from the set of the least unreliable information bits each time in the estimated source vector of SC decoding. Euclidean distance is used to measure the gap between the new neighbor solution and the received word so that the decoder can obtain a global optimal solution. Simulation shows that the proposed decoder has a performance gain about 0.5 dB in terms of frame error rate (FER) under short blocks in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel compared to other basic decoders, while keeping a low time cost through a parameter tuning process.