  This paper focuses on low complexity successive cancellation list (SCL)
decoding of polar codes. In particular, using the fact that splitting may be
unnecessary when the reliability of decoding the unfrozen bit is sufficiently
high, a novel splitting rule is proposed. Based on this rule, it is conjectured
that, if the correct path survives at some stage, it tends to survive till
termination without splitting with high probability. On the other hand, the
incorrect paths are more likely to split at the following stages. Motivated by
these observations, a simple counter that counts the successive number of
stages without splitting is introduced for each decoding path to facilitate the
identification of correct and incorrect path. Specifically, any path with
counter value larger than a predefined threshold \omega is deemed to be the
correct path, which will survive at the decoding stage, while other paths with
counter value smaller than the threshold will be pruned, thereby reducing the
decoding complexity. Furthermore, it is proved that there exists a unique
unfrozen bit u_{N-K_1+1}, after which the successive cancellation decoder
achieves the same error performance as the maximum likelihood decoder if all
the prior unfrozen bits are correctly decoded, which enables further complexity
reduction. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed low complexity SCL
decoder attains performance similar to that of the conventional SCL decoder,
while achieving substantial complexity reduction.
