A review of channel coding schemes in the 5G standard

The channel in a communication system is usually affected by noise, so channel coding is employed to avoid contamination of data due to noise. Channel coding is a significant and persuasive part of cellular communication systems, which increases the reliability of data transmission by detecting and correcting errors generated in the data while passing through the channel. The fourth generation standard can't achieve desired channel capacity and latency due to its high error floor, which is a challenge. For fifth generation (5G), two different channel coding techniques have been chosen by third generation partnership project for error-free data transmission. In the 5G standard, the data and control channels use low-density parity check (LDPC) and polar codes, respectively, due to their inherent benefits. This paper broadly surveys channel coding techniques varying code rate (R), codeword (N) and message (K) bits for encoding and list size (L) and iterations in decoding for 5G standards. The MATLAB-based simulation helps to find the best channel for the 5G standard considering the bit error rate (BER) and channel capacity performance among additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), Rayleigh and Rician channels for different channel coding and modulation techniques. The Monte-Carlo simulation shows that the LDPC codes with higher iteration and polar codes with larger list sizes achieve better BER performance keeping the code rate and modulation order lower for the AWGN channel. The simulation findings demonstrate that the distributed cyclic redundancy check successive cancellation list polar decoder outperforms the LDPC min-sum decoder without offset (N = 1024, K = 512, iteration or L = 16) but with offset it enhances LDPC’s BER performance making it suitable for even shorter N.