Efficient Decoders for Short Block Length Codes in 6G URLLC

Abstract: This paper reviews the potential channel decoding techniques for ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). URLLC is renowned for its stringent requirements including ultra-reliability, low end-to-end transmission latency, and packet-size flexibility. These requirements exacerbate the difficulty of the physical-layer design, particularly for the channel coding and decoding schemes. To satisfy the requirements of URLLC, decoders must exhibit superior error-rate performance \black{and} low decoding complexity. \black{Also, it is desired that decoders be universal} to accommodate various coding schemes. This paper provides a comprehensive review and comparison of different candidate decoding techniques for URLLC in terms of their error-rate performance and computational complexity for structured and random short codes. We further make recommendations of the decoder selections and suggest several potential research directions.