Symbol‐Level GRAND‐Assisted Detection for Polar‐Coded Spatial Modulation in MIMO Systems

ABSTRACT This work presents an integrated framework that combines polar coding, spatial modulation, and symbol‐level guessing random additive noise decoding (symbol‐level GRAND) aided detection to enhance the reliability and latency performance of CRC‐aided polar codes in 6G ultrareliable low‐latency communication (URLLC) scenarios. The proposed polar‐coded spatial modulation (PCSM) scheme utilizes (CA‐polar) codes to encode information bits transmitted as antenna index and symbol bits over a MIMO Rayleigh fading channel. The receiver employs a two‐stage detection scheme comprising initial spatial signal processing for antenna and symbol detection, followed by symbol refinement through symbol‐level GRAND with final error correction achieved with CRC‐aided successive cancellation list (CA‐SCL) decoding. A sequential detection and decoding strategy is adopted, in which symbol‐level GRAND refines the detected bits before CA‐SCL polar decoding, reducing error propagation into the polar decoder and thereby lowering the overall decoding complexity. Performance of the scheme is evaluated for polar codeword length of 128 bits for modulation orders of 16‐QAM and 64‐QAM, highlighting the scheme's parametric flexibility under short codeword constraints. Simulations carried out in MATLAB demonstrate that error correction with symbol‐level GRAND‐aided detection achieves an improved bit error rate (BER) and a lower system complexity facilitating real‐time hardware realization.