An efficient, portable and generic library for successive cancellation decoding of polar codes

Abstract

Error Correction Code decoding algorithms for consumer products such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices are usually implemented as dedicated hardware circuits. As processors are becoming increasingly powerful and energy efficient, there is now a strong desire to perform this processing in software to reduce production costs and time to market. The recently introduced family of Successive Cancellation decoders for Polar codes has been shown in several research works to efficiently leverage the ubiquitous SIMD units in modern CPUs, while offering strong potentials for a wide range of optimizations. The P-EDGE environment introduced in this paper, combines a specialized skeleton generator and a building blocks library routines to provide a generic, extensible Polar code exploration workbench. It enables ECC code designers to easily experiments with combinations of existing and new optimizations, while delivering performance close to state-of-art decoders.