INUE at ICC 2025 in Montréal

The INUE proudly contributed a research paper on polar code design to the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2025 held in Montréal, Québec, Canada from June 8 to 12. The ICC is the flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society and the largest academic conference in the field of telecommunications with more than 2000 participants. The contribution by the INUE emerged within the Open6GHub project, which was also present with a booth at the exbition hall. A total of 15 people from six project partners of the Open6GHub attended the conference.

Marvin Rübenacke presented the paper entitled "Nested Symmetric Polar Codes", co-authored by Andreas Zunker, Felix Krieg and Stephan ten Brink. In this work, we consider autormorphism ensemble decoding (AED) of polar codes, which is a low-complexity alternative to list decoding, which is currently the prevailing decoding algorithm for polar codes as used in 5G control channel. However, for AED to work, a specially tailored symmetric polar code construction is required. Additionally, for communications standards, the codes must be flexible in code length and rate. We show that the design process of such codes can be formulated as shortest-path problem on a graph, which is efficiently solved using Dijkstra's algorithm. Using the proposed methodology, we design the first nested rate-compatible sequence of polar codes that is suited for AED. It outperforms existing code designs as well as the state-of-the-art 5G polar code that requires more complex list decoding. With this work, the INUE is helping to make future communication systems even more reliable and energy-efficient.