Iterative Reed-Muller Decoding

Abstract

Reed-Muller (RM) codes are known for their good maximum likelihood (ML) performance in the short block-length regime. Despite being one of the oldest classes of channel codes, finding a low complexity soft-input decoding scheme is still an open problem. In this work, we present a belief propagation (BP) decoding architecture for RM codes based on their rich automorphism group. The decoding algorithm can be seen as a generalization of multiple-bases belief propagation (MBBP) using polar BP as constituent decoders. We provide extensive error-rate performance simulations and compare our results to existing decoding schemes. We report a near-ML performance for the RM(3,7)-code (e.g., 0.05 dB away from the ML bound at BLER of $10^{-4}$) at a competitive computational cost. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed decoder achieves the best performance of all iterative RM decoders presented thus far.

arXiv comment5 pages, accepted for publication at the International Symposium on Topics in Coding 2021 (ISTC), Sep. 2021. Short version of arXiv:2012.07635