October 5, 2021
Deviation from the standard — toward opening up 5G telecommunications
Much of the recent debate on the adoption of 5G wireless technology has centered on the issue of standards. To maintain data integrity in the face of network unreliability, systems rely on error-correcting codes. System standardization is predicated on co-designing these error-correcting codes and, most importantly, their generally complex decoders, into efficient, dedicated, and customized chips.
In this talk, Médard will describe her work developing “Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding,” or GRAND. This is a new method developed by Duffy, Médard and their research groups, which has shown that universal, code-agnostic decoding is possible for low to moderate redundancy settings in wireless technology. Moreover, recent work with Yazicigil and her group demonstrated that such decoding could be implemented with extremely low latency in silicon, processing a high volume of data with minimal delay. GRAND enables a new exploration of codes, in and of themselves, independently of tailored decoders, over a rich family of code designs, including random ones.
Médard and Duffy’s groups’ investigation reveals that even the simplest of codes, such as those currently used for error checking, do as well as state-of-the-art codes. Since multi-code encoders are readily constructed, we may consider, freed from dedicated decoders, to remove standardization (and the restrictions that come with it) in codes.