Study on Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes

Thanks to the property of provably capacityachieving, the recently-discovered polar codes are being taken many attentions. The Successive Cancellation (SC) is the first and widely known decoding for polar codes. In the paper, we study the decoding beginning with its recursive formula. Compared with previous works, our study is more strict and many fresh results are presented which would be helpful to all kinds of improvements on the SC decoding. Besides, based on them a nonrecursive tree SC decoding is proposed whose space complexity and latency are both O (N). Simulation results on the binary erasure channel verify its correctness.