and downlink control information for the enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) communication service. 5G foresees two other frameworks, namely ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) and massive machine-type communications (mMTC), for which polar codes are among the possible coding schemes.

The construction of a polar code involves the identification of channel reliability values associated to each bit to be encoded. This identification can be effectively performed given a code length and a specific signal-to-noise ratio. However, within the 5G framework, various code lengths, rates and channel conditions are foreseen, and having a different reliability vector for each parameter combination is unfeasible. Thus, substantial effort has been put in the design of polar codes that are easy to implement, having low description complexity, while maintaining good error-correction performance over multiple code and channel parameters.

The majority of available literature does not take into account the specific codes designed for 5G and their encoding process; given their upcoming widespread utilization, the research community would benefit from considering them within error-correction performance evaluations and encoder/decoder designs. Both the encoding and the decoding process can in fact incur substantial speed and complexity overhead, while the performance of decoders is tightly bound to the characteristics of the polar 