Efficient Decoders for Short Block Length Codes in 6G URLLC
Chentao Yue, Vera Miloslavskaya, Mahyar Shirvanimoghaddam, Branka Vucetic, Yonghui Li
Abstract
This article reviews the potential channel decoding techniques for ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). URLLC is renowned for its stringent requirements including ultra-reliability, low end-to-end transmission latency, and packet-size flexibility. These requirements exacerbate the difficulty of the physical-layer design, particularly for the channel coding and decoding schemes. To satisfy the requirements of URLLC, decoders must exhibit superior error-rate performance and low decoding complexity. Also, it is desired that decoders be universal to accommo-date various coding schemes. This article provides a comprehensive review and comparison of different candidate decoding techniques for URLLC in terms of their error-rate performance and computational complexity for structured and random short codes. We further make recommendations of the decoder selections and suggest several potential research directions.