Reduced Complexity SCL Decoding of U-UV Codes Through List Pruning

U-UV structural coding with algebraic component codes can provide competent error-correction performance in the short-to-medium length regime. Constituted by BCH component codes and its ordered statistics decoding (OSD), the successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding of U-UV codes can outperform that of cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-polar codes. However, this list decoding complexity becomes formidable as the decoding output list size L increases. This paper proposes the list pruning techniques for reducing the SCL complexity. It eliminates the unpromising decoding paths, in an effort to reduce redundant decoding operations. We show that this can be realized through either estimating the a posterior probability (APP) of a decoding path, or estimating the dynamic performance loss. Subsequently, two list decoding schemes are proposed for U-UV codes. Our simulation results show that they can both effectively reduce the SCL decoding complexity of U-UV codes with marginal performance loss.