CIF: Medium: Collaborative Research: New Frontiers in Polar Coding: 5G and Beyond

自20世纪80年代第一批移动电话问世以来，已经部署了四个不同的“代”无线网络，以支持向越来越多的用户可靠地传输不断增加的数据量。使这种可靠的信息传输成为可能的是纠错码，这是克劳德·香农在60多年前首先提出的。Polar编码是目前正在开发和标准化的第五代无线通信（即5G）中引入的一项关键的新纠错技术。因此，很快，世界各地的消费者在打电话或通过移动设备上网时都将使用极码。极性码可以证明达到香农1948年提出的通信的基本极限，编码和解码的复杂度较低。然而，为了实现极性编码在无线通信中的全部潜力，必须克服许多挑战。该项目解决了这些挑战，以促进极性编码在5G系统中的成功部署，同时研究了超出5G时间范围的极性编码的基本问题。这些问题包括时变信道的极化问题和有缺失信道的极化编码问题。这部分研究的结果将有助于建立纠错编码理论的基础，并将对受极性编码范式影响的邻近科学学科产生影响。信道极化和极性码的发现被普遍认为是编码理论的历史性突破。对于较短的块长度，循环冗余校验辅助连续取消列表解码的极性码是目前最著名的二进制输入高斯信道编码方案。考虑到这一点和其他因素，3GPP决定将极性编码纳入5G无线通信标准。该项目的首要目标是探索极性编码的新领域，从而从根本上推进当前该领域的最新技术。部分研究旨在立即与5G中极性编码的成功部署相关，而其他部分则侧重于超越5G时间范围的极性编码的关键理论问题。本课题的具体目标是：(1)在显著降低复杂度的情况下，获得循环冗余校验辅助极坐标链解码的成果；(2)构建实用的通用极码，不依赖于信道，并提供接近最优的有限长度性能；(3)开发基于极化码的码域多址技术，实现海量连接；(4)设计和评估扩展频道类别的极性编码方案，远远超出原始的无记忆和固定设置；(5)扩展极化范式，设计有缺失信道的极化码；(6)开发全尺寸高效、低延迟、低功耗的极性列表解码器片上系统实现。这个项目是由研究人员在极性编码中进行的广泛和变革性的先前工作的自然产物。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Since the first mobile phones became available in the 1980s, four distinct "generations" of wireless networks have been deployed to support reliable transmission of ever-increasing volumes of data to a growing number of users. What makes such reliable transmission of information possible are error-correcting codes, first conceived by Claude Shannon over 60 years ago. Polar coding is a key new error-correction technology introduced in the fifth wireless generation, known as 5G, that is currently being developed and standardized. Thus, soon enough, consumers the world over will all be using polar codes whenever making a phone call or accessing the Internet on a mobile device. Polar codes provably achieve the fundamental limits of communication established by Shannon in 1948, with low encoding and decoding complexity. Nevertheless, numerous challenges must be overcome in order to realize the full potential of polar coding in wireless communications. This project addresses these challenges to facilitate successful deployment of polar codes in 5G systems, while investigating fundamental problems in polar coding that lie beyond the 5G time horizon. These problems include polarization for time-varying channels and polar coding for channels with deletions. The results from this part of the investigation will contribute to the foundations of error-correction coding theory, and will also have an impact on adjacent scientific disciplines that are influenced by the polar-coding paradigm.The discovery of channel polarization and polar codes is universally recognized as an historic breakthrough in coding theory. For short block lengths, polar codes under cyclic-redundancy-check-aided successive-cancellation list decoding are currently the best known coding scheme for binary-input Gaussian channels. Due to this and other considerations, 3GPP has decided to incorporate polar codes in the 5G wireless communications standard. The overarching goal in this project is to explore new frontiers in polar coding, thereby fundamentally advancing the current state-of-the-art in the field. Part of the research aims for immediately relevance to successful deployment of polar codes in 5G, whereas other parts focus on key theoretical problems in polar coding that lie beyond the 5G time-horizon. The specific objectives in this project are as follows: (1) Attain the gains of cyclic-redundancy-check-aided polar list-decoding with significantly lower complexity; (2) Construct practical universal polar codes that are not channel-dependent and provide near-optimal finite-length performance; (3) Develop code-domain multiple access techniques based on polar codes to enable massive connectivity; (4) Design and evaluate polar coding schemes for extended classes of channels, going well beyond the original memoryless and stationary set-up; (5) Extend the polarization paradigm and design polar codes for channels with deletions; (6) Develop a full-scale efficient, low-latency, and low-power system-on-chip implementation of polar list decoders. This project is a natural outgrowth of extensive and transformative prior work carried out by the investigators in polar coding.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.