Polar codes have attracted the attention of academia and industry alike in the past decade, such that the 5$^\text{th}$ generation wireless systems (5G) standardization process of the 3$^\text{th}$ generation partnership project (3GPP) chose polar codes as a channel coding scheme. In this tutorial, we provide a description of the encoding process of polar codes adopted by the 5G standard. We illustrate the struggles of designing a family of polar codes able to satisfy the demands of 5G systems, with particular attention to rate flexibility and low decoding latency. The result of these efforts is an elaborate framework that applies novel coding techniques to provide a solid channel code for NR requirements.

to appear in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials