Improved List Decoding for Polar-Coded Probabilistic Shaping

A modified successive cancellation list (SCL) decoder is proposed for polar-coded probabilistic shaping. The decoder exploits the deterministic encoding rule for shaping bits to rule out candidate code words that the encoder would not generate. This provides error detection and decreases error rates compared to standard SCL decoding while at the same time reducing the length of the outer cyclic redundancy check code.