Efficient Decoders for Short Block Length Codes in 6G URLLC

TL;DR

This paper reviews various decoding techniques for short block length codes in 6G URLLC, focusing on achieving ultra-reliability and low latency with efficient, universal decoders.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of decoding methods for short codes in URLLC, highlighting their performance and complexity, and offers recommendations and future research directions.

Findings

Decoders must balance error-rate performance and low complexity.

Universal decoders can accommodate various coding schemes.

Structured and random short codes have different decoding challenges.

Abstract

This paper 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 \black{and} low decoding complexity. \black{Also, it is desired that decoders be universal} to accommodate various coding schemes. This paper 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.