Generalized Constituent Nodes for Simplified Successive-Cancellation Decoding of Multi-Kernel Polar Codes

The decoding latency of the successive-cancellation decoder for polar codes is of great importance in its practical applications, and it can be reduced by implementing multi-bit decision decoders in the constituent nodes of the decoding tree. In this letter, we develop a matrix analysis method to analyze the corresponding parity submatrix of the decoding tree’s internal node. Two generalized constituent nodes are presented for the fast simplified successive-cancellation (fast-SSC) decoding of linear kernels-mixed multi-kernel polar codes. Results show that the proposed method achieves latency reduction and preserves the error-correction performance.