US Patent 10361728 Multiple-symbol combination based decoding for general polar codes

The present disclosure relates to multiple-symbol combination based decoding for general polar codes. Multiple-symbol combination based decoding of a received word that is based on a codeword involves determining whether all nodes at an intermediate stage of the multiple-symbol combination based decoding, which provide their outputs as inputs to a subset of nodes at a next stage of the multi-symbol combination based decoding, are associated with trust symbols in the received word that have a higher reliability of being successfully decoded than doubt symbols in the received word. A hard decision is performed in response to a positive determination.