On the Performance of Short Binary BCH Codes for Ultra-Low Latency Wireless Communications

In recent years, polar codes have been considered for communication systems that require high re-liability and ultra-low latency, such as sixth generation (6G) wireless communications. This paper presents simulation results showing that short binary extended BCH (eBCH) codes with low-complexity decoding outperform polar codes for lengths 64 and 128. In the simulations, polar mapping under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is assumed and ordered-statistics decoding (OSD) of eBCH codes is compared with CRC-aided successive-cancellation list decoding (SCLD-CRC) of polar codes of the same lengths and rates. The results indicate that short-length binary eBCH codes achieve lower average bit error rate values (higher reliability) and thus should be considered as strong candidates in communication systems requiring extremely low latency, i.e., short code lengths of up to 128 bits. The eBCH simulation results are obtained with OSD and re-processing order equal to one so that complexity is comparable to SCLD-CRC. Specifically, error performances are quantified of length-64 and selected length-128 eBCH codes with order-1 OSD and polar codes with SCLD-CRC for the same rates and lengths. These results serve to verify that short binary eBCH codes do indeed outperform short polar codes with comparable decoding complexity.