Channel Coding Challenges for Short and Moderate Block Lengths-based Applications

Advanced channel coding schemes have recently gained much interest due to their capacity-approaching behavior, rendering them a vital choice for many applications in commercial systems such as satellite standards and cellular communications networks. Furthermore, the low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have already been chosen for user data in 5G New Radio (NR) systems since they provide high throughput and efficient error-correcting capabilities. In contrast, Polar in 5G NR is used for control information with enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and broadcast channels (BCH) since they can introduce an efficient decoding performance for short block lengths. Furthermore, LDPC is used in broadband satellite applications (DVB-S2) and DVB-S2 extensions (DVB-S2X), where LDPC and BCH codes are serially concatenated. This paper examines and addresses the merits of Polar and LDPC codes and their ability to adhere to the stringent requirements of satellite communications and the Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) applications. Moreover, simulation is performed to evaluate the performance of the LDPC and Polar codes used in 5G’s eMBB for short and moderate block lengths. More specifically, the convergence behavior regarding the number of iterations (LDPC) and list size (polar) is studied. Additionally, the performance and computational complexity are evaluated with various Polar and LDPC decoding algorithms.