On the Message Passing Efficiency of Polar and Low-Density Parity-Check Decoders

This study focuses on the efficiency of message-passing-based decoding algorithms for polar and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. Both successive cancellation (SC) and belief propagation (BP) decoding algorithms are studied under the message-passing framework. Counter-intuitively, SC decoding demonstrates the highest decoding efficiency although it was considered a weak decoder regarding error-correction performance. We analyze the complexity-performance tradeoff to dynamically track the decoding efficiency, where the complexity is measured by the number of messages passed (NMP), and the performance is measured by the statistical distance to the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate. This study offers new insight into the contribution of each message passing in decoding, and compares various decoding algorithms on a message-by-message level.