Flexible Channel Coding for 6G Short Packet Communication

The emerging sixth-generation (6G) of mobile networks will be a key part of the solution to the constantly increasing problem of urbanization and the digital divide. 6G has aligned its focus to the United Nations sustainable development goals (SDGs) and aims by 2030 to achieve the following targets: a) empower people by providing services and solutions to individuals and society; b) sense the environment by performing extensive hyper-local measurements and c) strengthen the world by reinforcing the ecosystem according to the SDGs.

Key 6G use cases such as wireless factory automation and autonomous driving will require ultra-high reliability and ultra-low latency, high-resolution localization, and high-accuracy inter-device synchronicity.

These requirements are well beyond the capabilities of existing mobile standards, including the fifth-generation (5G) mobile. Short packet communications play a key role in meeting the low latency requirements of many 6G applications.

Despite recent progress, the design of effective channel coding and decoding techniques for short packet communications is still far from sufficiency. 6G communication systems require flexibility in the blocklength and coding rates.

Short and moderate blocklength codes (approx. from 100 bits to a few thousand bits) with close-to-optimal performance are required for 6G.

A promising solution is rateless codes carefully optimized for short blocklength and able to provide flexibility in code rates, blocklength, and decoding complexity.

The main objective of this project is to develop new rateless coding schemes and decoding algorithms, to address the flexibility and bit-granularity for finite blocklength channel codes, and to design low-complexity decoding algorithms to address the latency issue in 6G short packet communications.

It is expected that our results can largely improve the performance of 6G networks in terms of latency, reliability, flexibility and complexity.