Implementation and evaluation of Polar Codes in 5G

Abstract: In today’s society the ability to communicate with one another has grown, were a lot of focus is aimed towards speed in the telecommunication industry. For transmissions to become even faster, there are many ways to enhance transmission speeds of which error correction is one. Padding messages such that they are protected from noise, while using as few bits as possible and ensuring safe transmit is handled by error correction codes. Short codes with low complexity is a solution to faster transmission speeds. An error correction code which has gained a lot of attention since its first appearance in 2009 is Polar Codes. Polar Codes was chosen as the 3GPP standard for 5G control channel. The goal of the thesis is to develop and implement Polar Codes and rate matching according to the 3GPP standard 38.212. Polar Codes are then to be evaluated with different block sizes and rate matching settings. Finally Polar Code is compared with Convolutional code in a LTE-simulation environment. The performance evaluations are presented using BLER/(Eb/N0)-graphs. In this thesis a Polar encoder, rate matching and a Polar decoder (with Successive Cancellation algorithm) were successfully implemented. The simulation results show that Polar Codes performs better with longer block sizes and also has a better BLER-performance than Convolutional Codes when given the same message lengths.