  We show that the performance of iterative belief propagation (BP) decoding of
polar codes can be enhanced by decoding over different carefully chosen factor
graph realizations. With a genie-aided stopping condition, it can achieve the
successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding performance which has already been
shown to achieve the maximum likelihood (ML) bound provided that the list size
is sufficiently large. The proposed decoder is based on different realizations
of the polar code factor graph with randomly permuted stages during decoding.
Additionally, a different way of visualizing the polar code factor graph is
presented, facilitating the analysis of the underlying factor graph and the
comparison of different graph permutations. In our proposed decoder, a high
rate Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) code is concatenated with a polar code and
used as an iteration stopping criterion (i.e., genie) to even outperform the
SCL decoder of the plain polar code (without the CRC-aid). Although our
permuted factor graph-based decoder does not outperform the SCL-CRC decoder, it
achieves, to the best of our knowledge, the best performance of all iterative
polar decoders presented thus far.
