Polar Codes with Integrated Probabilistic Shaping for 5G New Radio

TL;DR

This paper proposes a modified polar coding scheme with probabilistic shaping for 5G NR, enhancing error correction performance with minimal hardware changes, achieving up to 1dB gain for 256-QAM over AWGN channels.

Contribution

It introduces a novel polar coding modification with probabilistic shaping tailored for 5G NR, improving performance with limited hardware adjustments.

Findings

Up to 1dB SNR gain for 256-QAM on AWGN channels

Compatible with existing hardware at the transmitter

Small modifications needed at the receiver

Abstract

A modification to 5G New Radio (NR) polar code is proposed, which improves the error correction performance with higher order modulation through probabilistic shaping. The presented scheme mainly re-uses existing hardware at the transmitter, and modifications at the receiver are small. Simulation results show that the presented approach can improve the performance by up to 1dB for 256-QAM on AWGN channels