An investigation of low-density parity-check codes and polar codes for future communication systems

Abstract

In the fifth-generation (5G) era and future, mobile internet and internet of things (IoT) are the driving forces for mobile communications’ development. The three main 5G usage scenarios: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communication (mMTC), and ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC), require improvement in throughput, reliability, and latency as compared with the previous fourth generation (4G) system. In this paper, an investigation is done on the coding part of the wireless communication systems. Two channel coding types; low-density parity-check (LDPC) code which is used as the coding scheme for data transmission, and Polar code which is utilized for control in 5G are discussed. Moreover, simulations are performed to assess their performance. The simulation results revealed the superiority of polar code for transmitting short information messages and LDPC for transmitting long data messages. The use of LDPC and polar codes in 5G communication systems is justified by their ability to accommodate a wide range of data lengths and code rates, as well as their good bit error rate (BER) performance. Furthermore, the effect of the number of iterations on the BER performance of LDPC code and different decoding algorithms of polar code are considered.