There are two main methods for polar decoding:

1. The Successive Cancellation (SC) decoder and its variants.

2. The Belief Propagation (BP) decoder.

The SC decoder and its variants have a serial decoding nature (can not be parallelized), thus these decoders suffer from long latency and low throughput making them not suitable for high speed applications. The BP decoder can make use of parallel processing and thus enhance its throughput making it suitable for high speed applications.