CRC Code Design for List Decoding of Polar Codes

Cyclic redundancy check (CRC) assisted list successive cancellation decoding (SCLD) makes polar codes competitive with the state-of-art codes. In this letter, we try to find the optimal CRC for polar codes to further improve its performance. We first analyze the undetected error probability of CRC-aided SCLD as well as the characteristics of Hamming weight distribution of polar codes. Based on these characteristics, a multilevel SCLD-based searching strategy with moderate list size is proposed to compute the minimum Hamming weight distribution (MHWD) of different CRC-concatenated polar codes. Using the searched MHWD, the optimal CRC for polar codes are presented in this letter. Simulation results show that the performance of optimal CRC-aided SCLD significantly outperforms the standard one, especially at high code rate.