GLDPC-PC Codes: Channel Coding Towards 6G Communications

TL;DR

6G targets higher data rates, lower latency, and ultra-reliability, demanding channel codes with low complexity and strong short-length performance. The paper surveys state-of-the-art codes (LDPC, GLDPC, NB-LDPC, SC-LDPC, Polar, PAC) and introduces GLDPC-PC codes that couple polar-component constraints within a generalized LDPC framework, enabling soft-output iterative decoding via SO-SCL. Empirical results show GLDPC-PC codes achieving BLER gains over 5G baselines at moderate-to-high $E_b/N_0$, with no evident error floors down to $10^{-7}$ and decoding complexity comparable to polar/LDPC schemes. This approach suggests a practical, implementable path for 6G reliability and latency targets, while highlighting open issues in code design, encoding efficiency, and latency analysis.

Abstract

The sixth generation (6G) wireless communication system will improve the key technical indicators by one to two orders of magnitude, and come with some new features. As a crucial technique to enhance the reliability and efficiency of data transmission, the next-generation channel coding is thus confronted with new challenges in terms of complexity, latency, performance. This article supplies an overview of the potential channel codes for 6G communications. In addition, we explore to develop next-generation channel codes based on lowdensity parity-check (LDPC) and polar frameworks, introducing a concept named generalized LDPC with polar-like component(GLDPC-PC) codes. The codes have exhibited promising error correction performance and manageable complexity, which can be further optimized by specific code design. The opportunities and challenges of GLDPC-PC codes are also discussed.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: An example of the SCL decoding tree of a polar code with code length of 4, frozen bit equal to 0, and list size of 2 Yuan2024Near.
• Figure 2: The Tanner graph (left part) and parity check matrix (right part) representations of GLDPC-PC codes.
• Figure 3: BLER performance of GLDPC-PC codes over AWGN channel with $N=1024$ and $K=640$.
• Figure 4: BLER performance of GLDPC-PC codes over AWGN channel with $N=2048$ and $K=1280$.
• Figure 5: BLER performance of GLDPC-PC codes over AWGN channel with $N=4096$ and $K=3200$.