Optimizing Polar Codes for Reduced Latency Successive Cancellation List Decoder

This paper presents the application of genetic algorithms (GenAlg) to optimize polar codes for reducing the decoding latency of fast cyclic redundancy check aided successive cancellation list decoders. The theoretical decoding time steps (TS) in code construction are assessed under the constraint of a maximum special node size. The GenAlg employed iteratively utilizes mutation and crossover to reduce decoding TS by generating more large special nodes while maintaining acceptable performance. By avoiding redundant simulations, the GenAlg iterations are reduced by 5 orders of magnitude. Synthesis results indicate that the proposed scheme can reduce latency by up to 20.2% compared to 5G codes.