Among error-correcting codes, polar codes are the first to provably achieve channel capacity with an explicit construction. In this work, we present software implementations of a polar decoder that leverage the capabilities of modern general-purpose processors to achieve an information throughput in excess of 200 Mbps, a throughput well suited for software-defined-radio applications. We also show that, for a similar error-correction performance, the throughput of polar decoders both surpasses that of LDPC decoders targeting general-purpose processors and is competitive with that of state-of-the-art software LDPC decoders running on graphic processing units.
@article{arxiv.1306.6311,
title = {Fast Software Polar Decoders},
author = {Pascal Giard and Gabi Sarkis and Claude Thibeault and Warren J. Gross},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.6311},
year = {2015}
}