Huawei 5G: New Breakthrough on Channel Coding Technology with Polar Code

[Shenzhen, China, Oct. 8, 2016] Huawei recently announced the new breakthrough on 5G channel coding with regards to to Polar Code technology. This has been achieved during a field trial and follows previous achievements on 5G air-interface key technology Huawei has conducted within China IMT-2020(5G) Promotion Group activities in April 2016.

Several key assumptions have been taken into account, including:

• Use of millimeter-wave
• Tests performed under both static and mobile environments
• Multiple sessions in parallel based on short and large packets sizes

Under these conditions, Huawei has successfully reached a downlink 27Gbps in using Polar Code. It demonstrates that Polar Code technology can simultaneously meet all three typical use cases of eMBB (up to 20Gbps), uRLLC (1 ms latency) and mMTC (billions of connections) as per ITU 5G definition.

Firstly, Polar Code provides an efficient channel coding technology for 5G allowing significantly higher spectrum efficiency than today cellular accesses. Secondly, Polar Code has the practical decoding ability of linear complexity in order to minimize the implementation cost of coming 5G equipment. Therefore , Polar Code is the most competitive candidate of channel coding solution for coming 5G.

The 2 key properties of Polar Code are:

• On the encoding side, it can optimize the channel capacity closed to Shannon limit.
• On decoding side, by using the simple successive cancelation polarized channel it allows the similar performance as maximum likelihood decoding with a lower implementation complexity.

New air-interface is the most revolutionary part of coming 5G networks compared to legacy cellular accesses. Huawei has developed a set of cutting edge technologies such as F-OFDM，SCMA， Grant Free，Short TTI) and Polar Code . Recently, Huawei has successfully tested Polar Code in the field. Results show that it improves 3 times the spectrum efficiency to compare to current RAN networks. This achievement provides a key input for the on-going 5G standardization works and positions Polar Code as the best candidate to address Channel Coding.