Huawei has presented a special award to Turkish professor Dr Erdal Arikan, the inventor of polar codes for 5G, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the development of communications technology.

Huawei says the paper on polar codes that Dr Arikan published in 2008 defined an entirely new approach to maximizing the rate and reliability of data transmission. Huawei also says polar codes are the world’s first channel coding scheme to press the threshold of Shannon’s limit, or the maximum rate that data can be sent with zero error at a particular bandwidth. Polar codes significantly improve coding performance for 5G. At the same time, they reduce the complexity of design and ensure service quality. In 2016, 3GPP adopted polar codes as the official coding scheme for the control channels of 5G New Radio (NR) eMBB interface.



While presenting Dr Arikan with the award, Huawei also took the opportunity to heavily promote and celebrate how the company hopped on the polar codes bandwagon early in 2010, and helped develop polar codes from academic theory to commercial reality. At the awards ceremony, Huawei honored over 100 of its own scientists and engineers for their research in 5G NR and their “eight groundbreaking innovations” in 5G, and generally touted its accomplishments as “a major contributor to 5G standards, and a core patent holder”.

Speaking of which, Huawei also announced it is committed to following the FRAND (Fair, Reasonable, and Non-discriminatory) principle for all patent licensing.

“5G standards are the result of a worldwide effort to drive progress in basic research and wireless communications technology. For these standards to take shape, it took more than 10 years of hard work from tens of thousands of scientists and engineers, along with dozens of companies around the world,” said Huawei Rotating Chairman Eric Xu. “We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Professor Arikan, as well as his peers in academia, fellow scientists, and Huawei employees who have all contributed to 5G.”