Quasi-Optimal Path Convergence-Aided Automorphism Ensemble Decoding of Reed-Muller Codes

By exploiting the rich automorphisms of Reed-Muller (RM) codes, the recently developed automorphism ensemble (AE) successive cancellation (SC) decoder achieves a near-maximum-likelihood (ML) performance for short block lengths. However, the appealing performance of AE-SC decoding arises from the diversity gain that requires a list of SC decoding attempts, which results in a high decoding complexity. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel quasi-optimal path convergence (QOPC)-aided early termination (ET) technique for AE-SC decoding. This technique detects strong convergence between the partial path metrics (PPMs) of SC constituent decoders to reliably identify the optimal decoding path at runtime. When the QOPC-based ET criterion is satisfied during the AE-SC decoding, only the identified path is allowed to proceed for a complete codeword estimate, while the remaining paths are terminated early. The numerical results demonstrated that for medium-to-high-rate RM codes in the short-length regime, the proposed QOPC-aided ET method incurred negligible performance loss when applied to fully parallel AE-SC decoding. Meanwhile, it achieved a complexity reduction that ranged from 35.9% to 47.4% at a target block error rate (BLER) of 10-3, where it consistently outperformed a state-of-the-art path metric threshold (PMT)-aided ET method. Additionally, under a partially parallel framework of AE-SC decoding, the proposed QOPC-aided ET method achieved a greater complexity reduction that ranged from 81.3% to 86.7% at a low BLER that approached 10-5 while maintaining a near-ML decoding performance.