CA-DSL: CRC-Aided Dual Stage List Decoding of Polar-TPC Coded MIMO for URLLC

Polar-turbo product codes (polar-TPCs) are promising candidates for sixth-generation (6G) ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) applications because they enjoy nearoptimal decoding performance and low decoding latency. However, existing decoding schemes for polar-TPCs either fail to simultaneously ensure low block error rate (BLER) and low undetected error probability (UEP) or suffer performance degradation in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems. In this letter, we propose a novel CRC-aided dual-stage list (CA-DSL) decoder for error detection and decoding of polar-TPC coded MIMO systems. We apply block-level CRC-check to identify decoding failures and propose a dual stage tree search (DSTS) post-processing strategy to enhance BLER performance with low complexity. Furthermore, a joint parity and CRC check error detection scheme is proposed to improve the BLER while maintaining low UEP. The proposed CA-DSL scheme significantly reduces decoding complexity while achieving superior BLER and UEP performance compared to existing methods.