Improvement in or relating to communications systems using Reed-Muller codes

摘要

A method for a wireless communications system operating a Reed-Muller coding process, wherein a communication has a codeword that is punctured, the method comprising rate matching with a shifted puncturing scheme (fig. 4) having a predetermined shift so as to obtain an output bit sequence that can be decoded without ambiguity. The shifted puncturing scheme may be applied by selecting a row-shifted submatrix from a Reed-Muller code generation matrix to produce the codeword. The shifted puncturing scheme may repeat the prominent part of the codeword more times to improve decoding performance. The shift may be determined such that several first order columns of a permuted submatrix are highly correlated with a Hadamard transformation to give a single peak. Multiple shifts may be used to revolve decoding ambiguity. In the decoder (fig. 6) the received LLRs are accumulated or zero-padded and then circularly shifted prior to the permutation step so as to be aligned with the encoder. The shift may be predetermined, or calculated and signalled dynamically. The technique may be applied to an extended Physical Uplink Control Channel (PUCCH) format. The communications system may be a New Radio (5G) network.