Hybrid Sorting Method for Successive Cancellation List Decoding of Polar Codes

This paper proposes a hybrid metric sorting method (HMS) of successive cancellation list decoders for polar codes, which plays a critical role in decoding process. We review the state-of-the-art metric sorting methods and combine the advantages of them to generate the proposed method. Due to the optimized architecture, the proposed HMS method reduces the number of comparing stages effectively with little increase in comparisons. Evaluation results show that about 25 percent of comparing stages can be removed by HMS, compared with state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method enjoys a latency reduction for hardware implementation.