In this paper, we study several decoding algorithms for Polar Codes and provide simulation results of each decoding algorithms. Also, we provide a new low-complexity decoding algorithm, namely Successive Cancellation Fano (SC-Fano) decoding algorithm by appropriately incorporating Fano sequential decoding into the standard Successive Cancellation (SC) decoding. The proposed decoding follows the SC decoding with the additional process at every SC decoding stage such that it determines whether to move forward along the current path or move backward to find a better path. In this way, the SC-Fano decoding can prevent the SC decoding from error propagation (i.e., generating a wrong codeword). Compared with the other improvements of the SC decoding as SC list (SCL) decoding, SC stack (SCS) decoding and SC Flip (SCFlip) decoding, the proposed SC-Fano decoding has a very low memory requirement and thus is more suitable for hardware implementations. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed decoding can significantly improve the performance about 0.25 dB with an almost same complexity.
