Motivation: The Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is set to push the boundaries of what is so far achieved in the field. Some of the applications envisioned for I4.0 require the transmission of packets of short block lengths; a characteristic of machine to machine commmuniction (M2M) as opposed to human oriented transmission. With unprecidented requirements on reliability of transmission and stringent requirements on latency, it is necessary to study the performance of state of the art techniques in channel coding.

Objective: Polar codes are a class of capacity achieving codes. They were discovered more recently than other capacity achieving codes such as Turbo and LDPC codes. Polar codes in a relatively short amount of time have proven their strength in error correction with a low complexity. Their performance in short block regimes is, nevertheless, questionable. For this reason there is ongoing research to improve their performance. The objective of this project is to analyse the performance of polar codes, their complexity for the sake of latency, and study the techniques so far discovered to improve their performance in short block regimes.

Requirements: Knowledge of channel coding and information theory.