Fast Sphere Decoding of Short Systematic Polar-Like Codes

IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 2026

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Authors: Huayi Zhou, Y. Liu, Xiaosi Tan, Chen Ji, Warren J. Gross, Chuan Zhang
DOI: 10.1109/tvt.2025.3627411
Cited by: 2
References: 22

Abstract

Short polar-like codes are competitive for low latency requirements in future communications. Systematic polar codes have not been shown to offer substantial benefits for decoders beyond improving the bit error rate. In this paper, we demonstrate that the sparsity of the equivalent generator matrix of systematic polar codes significantly reduces calculation complexity when using sphere decoding (SD). We propose a fast SD (Fast-SD) for systematic polar codes. Numerical results indicate that the proposed Fast-SD reduces calculation complexity by up to 33.25% compared to SD on short high-rate codes while maintaining maximum likelihood performance.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Error Correcting Code Techniques Advanced Wireless Communication Techniques PAPR reduction in OFDM

Publication details

Journal / source
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Volume
75
Issue
5
Pages
8699–8704
Publication date
16 January 2026