Partially Polarized Polar Codes: A New Design for 6G Control Channels
We introduce a new family of polar-like codes, called Partially Polarized Polar (PPP) codes. PPP codes are constructed from conventional polar codes by selectively pruning polarization kernels, thereby modifying the synthesized bit-channel capacities to ensure a guaranteed number of non-frozen bits available early in decoding. These early-access information bits enable more effective early termination, which is particularly valuable for blind decoding in downlink control channels, where user equipment (UE) must process multiple candidates, many of which carry no valid control information. Our results show that PPP codes offer substantial performance gains over conventional polar codes, particularly at larger block lengths where hardware limitations restrict straightforward scaling. Compared with existing methods such as aggregation or segmentation, PPP codes achieve higher efficiency without the need for additional hardware support. Finally, we propose several frozen-bitmap design strategies tailored to PPP codes.