A Flexible Polar Decoding Architecture With Adjustable Latency and Reliability

Abstract

Future mobile and wireless communications should support various applications with their own reliability and latency requirements. Polar codes, adopted in the 5G standard, are capacity achieving as the codeword length increases even with low complexity successive cancellation (SC) decoding. On the other hand, to improve the performance under relatively short codeword lengths, successive cancellation list (SCL) decoding together with the use of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes is widely adopted. In this paper, a new design architecture of polar codes is proposed to support applications with diverse reliability and latency requirements. In the proposed approach referred to as a priority-oriented polar code (POPC), the information bits are divided into the two parts, priority bit sequence (PBS) and regular bit sequence (RBS), where the former should be output earlier than the latter in the process of SC or SCL decoding. Theoretical and simulation results show that PBS can be decoded with high reliability and low decoding latency, whereas RBS remains to achieve the same performance as the original decoding approach.

Keywords

• Cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes
• polar codes
• successive cancellation (SC) decoding
• ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC)