Huawei presents award to 5G innovator Erdal Arikan

Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei has presented a special award to Turkish professor Erdal Arikan, the inventor of polar codes for 5G.
polar codes recognitionHuawei also honored more than 100 in-house experts who are working on standards and basic research — in Shenzhen.

“It gives me pleasure to acknowledge that, without the vision and technical contributions of Huawei directors and engineers, polar codes would not have made it from lab to a standard in less than 10 years,” Arikan said.

The polar codes invented by Erdal Arikan define an entirely new approach to maximizing the rate and reliability of data transmission. Polar codes are the world’s only channel coding scheme to bring us up against the threshold of Shannon’s limit, or the maximum rate that data can be sent with zero errors at a particular bandwidth.

Polar codes significantly improve coding performance for 5G. They reduce the complexity of decoding, and cut down on the power consumption of signal receivers. Professor Arikan’s discovery took the industry by storm. In 2016, 3GPP selected polar codes as the official coding scheme for the control channels of 5G New Radio (NR) interface.

In 2010, Huawei recognized the potential in polar codes to optimize channel coding technology, and invested in research to build on Arikan’s work.

“We will continue to work hard to ensure that 5G technology – including polar codes – creates greater value for society, and sooner. As a major contributor to 5G standards, and a core patent holder, we are committed to following the FRAND principle for all patent licensing,” Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu said.

Huawei honored more than 100 of its in-house experts for their work on standards and basic research. The company recognized their research in 5G New Radio, as well as their efforts to work with industry partners to drive the development and adoption of relevant standards, as well as the verification of key technologies.

Huawei, the number one telecom equipment maker, has also recognized its members for 8 innovations, including new waveforms and new coding schemes, which were included in the 3GPP’s 5G Release 15 standards.