Design of Low-Density Parity Check Codes for 5G New Radio

Turbo codes, prevalent in most modern cellular devices, are set to be replaced by LDPC codes as the code for forward error correction. This transition was ushered in mainly because of the high throughput demands for 5G New Radio (NR). The new channel coding solution also needs to support incremental-redundancy hybrid ARQ, and a wide range of blocklengths and coding rates, with stringent performance guarantees and minimal description complexity. In this article, we first briefly review the requirements of the new channel code for 5G NR. We then describe the LDPC code design philosophy and how the broad requirements of 5G NR channel coding led to the introduction of novel structural features in the code design, culminating in an LDPC code that satisfies all the demands of 5G NR.