  Polar codes is promising because they can provably achieve the channel
capacity while having an explicit construction method. Lots of work have been
done for the bit-based decoding algorithm for polar codes. In this paper,
generalized symbol-based successive cancellation (SC) and SC list decoding
algorithms are discussed. A symbol-based recursive channel combination
relationship is proposed to calculate the symbol-based channel transition
probability. This proposed method needs less additions than the
maximum-likelihood decoder used by the existing symbol-based polar decoding
algorithm. In addition, a two-stage list pruning network is proposed to
simplify the list pruning network for the symbol-based SC list decoding
algorithm.
