Design of Polar Codes in 5G New Radio

Polar codes have attracted the attention of academia and industry alike in the past decade, such that the 5th generation wireless systems (5G) standardization process of the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) chose polar codes as a channel coding scheme. In this tutorial, the authors provide a description of the encoding process of polar codes foreseen by the 5G standard. They illustrate the struggles of designing a family of polar codes able to satisfy the demands of 5G systems, with particular attention to rate flexibility and low decoding latency. The result of these efforts is an elaborate framework that applies novel coding techniques to provide a solid channel code for NR requirements.