Multi-stack Decoding Algorithm for Polarization-adjusted Convolutional Codes

The Polar-Adjusted Convolutional (PAC) codes, improve the error correction ability of the polar code by concatenating convolutional transformation and polar transformation. For the traditional stack decoding algorithm, the ideal performance has not yet been achieved for some PAC codes. In this paper, we adopt a multi-stack decoding algorithm to further improve the error performance of PAC codes. In the multi-stack decoding algorithm, the original single stack is converted into multiple stacks, which expands the exploration path of decoding, obtains more possible decoding results, and improves the decoding performance of PAC codes. Compared to the single-stack decoding, the multi-stack decoding achieves a performance gain of approximately 0.2dB for a PAC code with code length 128 and rate 0.5.