A Comparative Study of Short-length Error Correction Codes in Datacasting Scenarios

This paper evaluates and compares the performance of short-length error correction codes for datacasting in Geographically Segmented Localcasting (GSL) scenarios. While GSL enhances spectrum efficiency and coverage, challenges such as synchronization and interference remain. Robust error correction codes are essential to optimize datacasting, particularly for short code lengths. This study investigates polar codes, Polarization-Adjusted Convolutional (PAC) codes, Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem (BCH) codes, and Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes over different channels. Polar and PAC codes demonstrate strong performance for short block lengths but suffer from decoding complexity and latency. BCH codes are efficient but their effectiveness declines with hard-decision decoding and longer code lengths. Although the performance of LDPC codes may underperform under short-length code conditions, they exhibit high adaptability to diverse channel conditions and can achieve lower decoding delays in high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios.