Huawei has claimed a breakthrough on channel coding for 5G networks during a field trial in China, achieving download speeds of 27Gbps.
The Chinese vendor said its latest trial makes the case for ‘polar code’, an emerging theory for detecting and correcting transmission errors in mobile networks, as the most competitive candidate for channel coding of 5G communications. It claimed spectrum efficiency is three times greater with polar coding than with current RAN coding technologies.
It said the trial proved polar coding was appropriate for typical 5G use cases and characteristics, including high speed and ultra-low latency wireless communications, enabled by devices deployed in extremely large volumes.
“Polar Code provides an efficient channel coding technology for 5G allowing significantly higher spectrum efficiency than today’s cellular accesses. It has the practical decoding ability of linear complexity in order to minimise the implementation cost of coming 5G equipment,” Huawei said in a statement.
Specifically, the vendor said polar coding can optimise channel activity to the point it is running at close to its maximum transfer rate, or Shannon limit, on the encoding side. It also allows close-to-optimal performance on the decoding side, with less complex implementation, it said.
In May, Huawei said it had completed testing a new air interface for 5G networks during outdoor macro network tests in Chengdu, China.
It used a combination of filtered orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (F-OFDM), sparse code multiple access (SCMA) and polar code during the trial. Huawei reckons the air interface is the “most revolutionary part of the coming 5G networks”.