Channel Coding and Decoding Schemes for URLLC

This chapter reviews the state‐of‐the‐art channel coding techniques for ultra‐reliable and low‐latency communications (URLLC). The stringent requirements of URLLC services, such as ultra‐high reliability, low‐latency, and rate compatibility, have made it the most challenging feature of the fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks. The problem is even more challenging for services beyond the 5G promise, such as telesurgery and factory automation, which require latency less than 1ms and packet error rates as low as 10⁻⁹.This chapter overviews candidate channel codes for URLLC, and compares them in terms of performance and complexity. Their respective strengths and weaknesses are investigated in terms of the performance gap to theoretical limits and the computational complexity of practical decoding algorithms. Furthermore, the ordered statistics decoding (OSD) is introduced as one of the potential universal decoding algorithms for URLLC, which can achieve near‐optimal performance for any block code. The error performance and computational complexity of OSD are investigated in this chapter. Finally, recent improvements on OSD, including decoding rules and complete decoder design, are studied.