A Simplified Decoding Method of Polar Codes Based on Hypothesis Testing

In this letter, a simplified successive cancellation decoding algorithm of polar codes is proposed, where a hard decision rule is adopted by exploiting the prior information in frozen bits for better decoding performance. Considering the difference of the node reliability, a hypothesis-testing-based strategy is designed to select reliable unstructured nodes for hard decision. Then the reliable nodes are decoded by the proposed hard decision method without serial recursion, which reduces the decoding latency. Simulation results show the advantages of the proposed method in terms of the decoding latency and error-correction ability compared with the existing methods.