Study of Puncturing Techniques for Polar Codes in 5G Cellular and IoT Networks

This paper presents a puncturing technique based on the channel polarization index for the design of rate-compatible polar codes in the fifth generation (5G) of wireless systems. The proposed strategy consists of two steps: we first generate the codeword message; and then we reduce the length of the codeword based on the channel polarization index where channels with the smallest channel polarization indices are punctured. We consider the proposed punctured polar codes with the successive cancellation (SC) decoder and the Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) aided SC list (CA-SCL) decoder and punctured bits known to both the encoder and the decoder. The Polar Spectra (PS) are then used to performance analysis the puncturing technique. Simulations for 5G scenarios show that the proposed polar codes perform comparable to Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes.