PCC Polar Codes for Future Wireless Communications: Potential Applications and Design Guidelines

The main limitation of polar codes is that the channel polarization is insufficient in the context of short and moderate codeword length, resulting in a degradation of error correction performance. Promising solutions can be found in the recently proposed parity-check-concatenated (PCC) polar codes, which exploit the scattered parity bits to improve the error correction capability substantially. Owing to this benefit, PCC polar codes constitute an appealing paradigm of channel coding and have been deemed a critical technology of the control channel coding for 5G mobile communication. As an emerging channel coding, its potentiality has yet to be thoroughly investigated. To unleash the eminent benefits of the PCC polar codes, in this article we present a comprehensive overview, including its innovative construction of encoding, low-complexity decoding, advanced evolution variants, and potential application scenarios, as well as its future design guidelines.