On the Performance of Short Binary BCH Codes for Ultra-Low Latency Wireless Communications

2024-12-25

AI Summary

For ultra-low-latency communications in 6G, short codes with lengths of 64 or 128 bits are essential, yet the optimal coding scheme under strict decoding complexity constraints remains open. Method: This work systematically compares extended binary BCH (eBCH) codes against polar codes at identical code rates and low-complexity decoding: eBCH employs order-1 ordered statistics decoding (OSD-1), while polar codes use CRC-aided successive cancellation list decoding (SCLD). Performance is evaluated via Monte Carlo simulation over the AWGN channel. Contribution/Results: Results demonstrate that eBCH achieves significantly lower average bit error rate (BER) than polar codes—particularly in the medium-to-high SNR regime—under comparable decoding complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to establish eBCH’s superiority over polar codes in the ultra-short-block-length regime under fair complexity constraints. The findings challenge the prevailing assumption of polar code dominance for ultra-reliable, low-latency short-packet transmission and position eBCH as a more promising candidate for 6G short-code applications.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Neural Spike Coding
• Machine Learning: Multi-class/Multi-label Learning & Extreme Classification
• Search and Optimization: Evolutionary Computation

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

In recent years, polar codes have been considered for communication systems that require high re-liability and ultra-low latency, such as sixth generation (6G) wireless communications. This paper presents simulation results showing that short binary extended BCH (eBCH) codes with low-complexity decoding outperform polar codes for lengths 64 and 128. In the simulations, polar mapping under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is assumed and ordered-statistics decoding (OSD) of eBCH codes is compared with CRC-aided successive-cancellation list decoding (SCLD-CRC) of polar codes of the same lengths and rates. The results indicate that short-length binary eBCH codes achieve lower average bit error rate values (higher reliability) and thus should be considered as strong candidates in communication systems requiring extremely low latency, i.e., short code lengths of up to 128 bits. The eBCH simulation results are obtained with OSD and re-processing order equal to one so that complexity is comparable to SCLD-CRC. Specifically, error performances are quantified of length-64 and selected length-128 eBCH codes with order-1 OSD and polar codes with SCLD-CRC for the same rates and lengths. These results serve to verify that short binary eBCH codes do indeed outperform short polar codes with comparable decoding complexity.

Problem

• Short Binary eBCH Codes
• Polar Codes
• Ultra-Low Latency Communication Systems

Innovation

• eBCH Codes
• Ultra-fast Wireless Communication
• Low Error Rate