Andreas Zunker, M.Sc.

Overview

In modern communication systems—such as mobile networks, Wi‑Fi, Ethernet, and satellite links—virtually every transmitted message is protected by channel coding. Channel coding adds carefully designed redundancy to transmitted data so that errors introduced by noise in the communication channel can be detected and corrected at the receiver. This process is essential for reliable digital communication, from high-speed data networks to deep-space transmissions.

Polar Codes

Among the many families of channel codes, polar codes hold a special place. Introduced by Erdal Arıkan in 2009, polar codes were the first class of codes proven to achieve the capacity of a wide range of communication channels. In theory, this allows them to transmit information at the maximum possible rate with an arbitrarily low error probability. Polar codes are particularly notable for their combination of a rich algebraic structure with low-complexity encoding and soft-decision decoding, making them well suited for wireless communication and leading to their adoption in the 5G New Radio standard.

My Research

While polar codes achieve channel capacity in the limit of infinite block lengths, their performance at finite lengths can be improved through pre-transformation techniques—such as concatenation with a CRC—and by viewing them more generally as instances of the Plotkin concatenation of simple codes.

My research focuses on designing polar-like codes that combine excellent error-correction performance with low decoding complexity. The aim is to develop codes that can be efficiently decoded using successive cancellation or related algorithms, bringing practical performance closer to theoretical limits.

If you are a student interested in the aforementioned topics, feel free to contact me for a thesis.