Demystifying 5G Polar and LDPC Codes: A Comprehensive Review and Foundations

This paper serves as a comprehensive guide for practitioners and scholars aiming to understand the channel coding and decoding schemes integral to the 5G NR standard, with a particular focus on LDPC and polar codes. We start by explaining the design procedures that underlie these channel codes, offering fundamental information from the perspectives of both encoding and decoding. In order to determine the present status of research in this area, we also provide a thorough literature review. Notably, we add comprehensive, standard-specific information to these foundational evaluations that is frequently difficult to extract from technical specification documents. The significance of reviewing and refining the foundations of the aforementioned codes lies in their potential to serve as candidate error-correcting codes for the future 6G standard and beyond.