A Novel Design of Downlink Control Information Encoding and Decoding Based on Polar Codes

In legacy long term evolution (LTE) networks, multiple transmission modes are defined to cater to diverse wireless environment and improve the spectrum utilization. However, constrained by user equipment (UE) processing capability on blind detection of downlink control information (DCI), two transmission modes are allowed to be configured to UE simultaneously. In recent 5G standardization, the polar codes have supplanted the tail biting convolution codes (TBCC), becoming the channel coding scheme for downlink control information (DCI). Motivated by its successive decoding property, a novel design of DCI encoding and decoding is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme could support dynamic configuration of transmission modes with decreasing the complexity of blind detection. Evaluation results from link level simulations show that the performance loss compared to conventional encoding/decoding scheme is generally negligible and the proposed scheme can comply with the false alarm rate (FAR) target of 5G standardization