Performance Analysis of CA ‐Polar Code for 5G ‐ IoT Low Power Wide Area Networks
Abhilasha Gautam, Prabhat Thakur, Ghanshyam Singh · Internet Technology Letters · 2026
ABSTRACT CRC‐Aided Polar (CA‐Polar) codes are the standardized channel coding scheme for control channels of 5G eMBB service class due to their capacity achieving performance. This work aims to assess the compatibility and scalability of CA‐Polar codes toward low power IoT applications coming under the domain of LPWAN. A reduction in bit error rate (BER) of information bits at the receiver results in a lesser number of retransmissions, thereby significantly improving energy efficiency by reducing the transmit power. Consequently, we perform the BER analysis of the CA‐SCL decoder by varying CRC lengths, code rates and list sizes (8 and 16) for block lengths 64 ≤ K ≤ 512. Additionally, a comparative error rate performance analysis between LDPC and CA‐Polar codes is conducted at different code rates. Further, the evaluation of CA‐Polar codes for different CRC configurations under a Rayleigh fading channel to quantify the impact of multipath propagation on decoding reliability is presented. This analysis aims to identify the most effective combination of CRC length, list size, and code rate for short block length CA‐Polar codes with SCL decoding, targeting energy‐efficient low‐power IoT scenarios.