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，已经部署了四代不同的无线网络，以支持向越来越多的用户可靠地传输日益增长的数据量。使这种可靠的信息传输成为可能的是纠错码，它最初是由克劳德·香农在60多年前构思的。极地编码是第五代无线技术(即5G)中引入的一种关键的新纠错技术，目前正在开发和标准化。因此，很快，世界各地的消费者无论何时在移动设备上打电话或访问互联网都将使用极地码。极性码可以证明达到了香农在1948年建立的通信的基本极限，并且具有较低的编码和译码复杂度。然而，为了充分发挥极地编码在无线通信中的潜力，必须克服许多挑战。该项目解决了这些挑战，以促进在5G系统中成功部署极性码，同时调查5G时间范围之外的极性码的基本问题。这些问题包括时变信道的极化和具有删除的信道的极坐标编码。这一部分的研究成果将有助于纠错编码理论的建立，并将对受极坐标编码范式影响的邻近学科产生影响。信道极化和极坐标编码的发现被公认为是编码理论的历史性突破。对于短块长度，循环冗余校验辅助的逐次消除列表译码下的极性码是目前最已知的用于二进制输入高斯信道的编码方案。出于这一等考虑，3GPP决定在5G无线通信标准中纳入极地码。该项目的首要目标是探索极地编码的新领域，从而从根本上推进该领域的当前最先进水平。部分研究旨在与5G中成功部署极性码直接相关，而其他部分则专注于5G时间范围之外的极化码的关键理论问题。本项目的具体目标如下：(1)以较低的复杂度获得循环冗余校验辅助极化表译码的增益；(2)构造与信道无关的实用通用极性码，并提供接近最优的有限长度性能；(3)发展基于极性码的码域多址技术，以实现大规模连通性；(4)设计和评估扩展类信道的极性码方案，远远超出原来无记忆和静止的设置；(5)扩展极化范例，为删除的信道设计极性码；(6)开发了一种全规模的高效、低延迟、低功耗的极点列表解码器的片上系统实现。该项目是调查人员在极地编码方面进行的广泛和变革性前期工作的自然产物。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.