An Early Termination Scheme for Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

In order to minimize the decoding period and the response time for Polar Codes, an early termination (ET) scheme based on additional check points (ACPs) is proposed in this work. For conventional ET schemes based on distributed parity-check (PC) bits, ET can only be triggered when the decoding process reaches the PC bits. The ACPs are selected from the information bits, and extend the feature of the PC bits, where ET can also be triggered at the ACPs, meaning that a more rapid ET is available that does not impact the error-rate performance. With sophisticated method of selecting ACPs based on the channel-independent polarization weight (PW), the proposed ET scheme is able to reduce the response time by about 5.